preg_match and UTF-8 in PHP

php unicode utf-8 pcre

Although the u modifier makes both the pattern and subject be interpreted as UTF-8, the captured offsets are still counted in bytes.

You can use mb_strlen to get the length in UTF-8 characters rather than bytes:

$str = "\xC2\xA1Hola!";preg_match('/H/u', $str, $a_matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);echo mb_strlen(substr($str, 0, $a_matches[0][1]));

php unicode utf-8 pcre

Try adding this (*UTF8) before the regex:

preg_match('(*UTF8)/H/u', "\xC2\xA1Hola!", $a_matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);

php unicode utf-8 pcre

'u' switch only makes sense for pcre, PHP itself is unaware of it.

From PHP's point of view, strings are byte sequences and returning byte offset seems logical (i don't say "correct").

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