php multibyte string acessing via key [$i] - php

Question

there is a string $string = "öşğüçı"; pay attention to the last one which is not i
when I want to print first char by echo $string[0] it prints nothing.. I know they are multibyte ones.. though printing first character can be accomplished by
echo $string[0].$string[1] but that is not what I want.. the question is
how can I make the obove mentioned issue just to program in a way below
for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($string); $i++)
echo $string[$i] . " ";
and it will print the following
ö ş ğ ü ç ı
masters of php please help...

Answer 1

to split a string into characters
$string = "öşğüçı";
preg_match_all('/./u', $string, $m);
$chars = $m[0];
note the "u" flag in the regular expression

Answer 2

<?php
// inform the browser you are sending text encoded with utf-8
header("Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");
// if you're using a literal string make sure the file
// is saved using utf-8 as encoding
// or if you're getting it from another source make sure
// you get it in utf-8
$string = "öşğüçı";
// if you do not have your string in utf-8
// you need to find out the actual encoding
// and use "iconv" to convert it to utf-8
// process the string using the mb_* functions
// knowing that it is encoded in utf-8 at this point
$encoding = "UTF-8";
for($i = 0; $i < mb_strlen($string, $encoding); $i++) {
echo mb_substr($string, $i, 1, $encoding);
}
Of course if you prefer another encoding (but I wouldn't see why; maybe just utf-16) you can substitute each instance of "utf-8" from above with your desired encoding and read and use accordingly.
Example for UTF-16 output (file/input is encoded in UTF-8)
<?php
header("Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-16");
$string = "öşğüçı";
$string = iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-16", $string);
$encoding = "UTF-16";
for($i = 0; $i < mb_strlen($string, $encoding); $i++) {
echo mb_substr($string, $i, 1, $encoding);
}

Answer 3

You cannot handle multi-byte strings in this way in PHP. If it's a fixed-length encoding, where every character takes up, say, two bytes, you can simply take two bytes at a time. If it's a variable-length encoding like UTF-8 though, you will need to use mb_substr and mb_strlen.
May I recommend What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text, which explains this in more detail.

Answer 4

Use iconv_substr or mb_substr to get character and iconv_strlen or mb_strlen to get size of string.