Most text on the Internet is a special collection of bits defined in some sort of

character set.

These days, that character set is probably UTF-8,

which stands for Unicode Transfer Format.

The 8 is just to differentiate it from other types of UTF character sets,

which store things a little differently.

Over the last ten years, UTF-8 has taken over from other character sets as

the most popular character encoding, and

is able to fit pretty much any character you would want to insert as text.

UTF-8 can handle all Unicode characters,

including international characters, symbols, and things like emoticons.

Whether supporting fancy emoticons is something that interests you or

not, supporting international characters outside of the basic a to z

range is very important.

Even if your application is launching somewhere like the U.S.A. or

United Kingdom, lots of people have special characters in their name and

that will need UTF-8 to support things like accented characters and Cyrillics.

PHP will work with UTF-8 content and

is getting more features to make it even easier.

But much of that functionality is tucked away in a non-default extension

called mbstring.

Before we can work with mbstring, we need to make sure it's enabled.

So open up index.php and I'll show you how to check.

On line 3, we're calling the core function phpinfo.

This function will output all sorts of useful information to the screen,

including information about installed and enabled modules.

On line 4, the exit statement is being used to halt execution of the script,

and none of the rest of this code will run.

We'll get to that in a second.

But first, let's click on the eye icon to preview this script and

see what phpinfo shows us.

If we use the Find functionality in our browser, we can type mbstring.

And not this first part, this is what we want to see here.

If the mbstring section is missing or disabled, then you will need to enable it.

But luckily for us, it's always enabled on Workspaces.

Let's go back to our workspace and remove lines 3 or 4, and

then take a look at the rest of this code.

On line 6, we're calling the function named mb_internal_encoding.

We pass it a string argument with the name of our encoding, which, in this case,

is UTF-8.

This lets the mbstring extension know which character encoding we

wish to work with.

On line 7, we call a function named mb_http_output.

And once again, we pass it a string as an argument containing UTF-8.

This lets mbstring know that our HTML will be output as UTF-8.

These two lines might seem like they're overkill, but

it's handy to be verbose when working with UTF-8.

Line 9 is a string variable called string.

It's full of accented characters that do not exist in ASCII but do exist in UTF-8.

On line 11 here, we're using the header function to set the HTTP header manually.

Headers are separated by name and value with a colon.

And in this instance, we're setting the content type to text/html.

That's not too interesting as that's the default header anyway, but

we're also appending an extra attribute.

By setting charset UTF-8 here, we're letting the browser know that

any HTML following this is going to be UTF-8 too.

Finally, we're outputting a basic HTML page with a title and a body.

This contains two paragraphs.

The first paragraph is going to output an uppercased version of this string, and

the second is going to output the length of the string.

Let's see what happens when we try and refresh the browser.

Now these results look a little funny.

PHP is doing its best to try and uppercase a string, but

it would only be able to change the case of non-Unicode characters.

Also, if we asked for the length of this string, the Unicode characters will

confuse PHP and make it think the string is longer than it really is.

Really, this string is only 36 characters long to a human, but PHP thinks it's 41.

We can fix this quite easily by using the mb extension functions.

All we have to do here is append mb to the front.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

And there we go.

Now the count is correctly 36 characters and all of the characters being uppercase,

not just the ASCII ones.

There's a mbstring replacement function for pretty much every core

string function, so just try shoving mb on the front and it should work.

This will get you started working with the UTF-8 and PHP.

But once you start interacting with a database,

you'll need to get that set up as UTF-8 too.

Visit PHP The Right Way to see a little bit about how that all works.

Let's move on to the next stage.