How to get each character from a word with special encoding

Question

I need to get an array with all the characters from the word, but the word has letters with special encoding like á when I execute the following code:

$word = 'withá'; $word_arr = array(); for ($i=0;$i<strlen($word);$i++) { $word_arr[] = $word[$i]; } 

or

 $word_arr = str_split($word); 

I get:

array (6) {[0] => string (1) "w" [1] => string (1) "i" [2] => string (1) "t" [3] => string (1) "h" [4] => line (1) "Ã" [5] => line (1) "¡"}

How can I do to get each character as follows?

array (5) {[0] => string (1) "w" [1] => string (1) "i" [2] => string (1) "t" [3] => string (1) "h" [4] => line (1) "á"}

Answer 1

Since this is a UTF-8 string, just do

 $word = 'withá'; $word = utf8_decode($word); $word_arr = array(); for ($i=0;$i<strlen($word);$i++) { $word_arr[] = $word[$i]; } 

The reason for this is that although it looks right in your script, the interpreter will convert it to a multibyte character (why mb_split() works). To convert it to the correct UTF-8 format, you can use the mb functions or just specify utf8_decode() .

Answer 2

I think mb_split will do it for you: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-split.php

If you use special encodings, you probably want to familiarize yourself with how PHP handles multibyte encoding in general ...

EDIT: No, I can't figure out how to make mb_split do it myself, but looking back, SO has a few more questions that preg_split answered. I tested this and it seems to do exactly what you want:

 preg_split('//',$word,-1,PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY); 

I would still highly recommend that you read multibyte characters in PHP. It's kind of a mess, IMHO.

Here are some good links: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html as well as http://akrabat.com/php/utf8-php-and-mysql/ and much more can be found ...

Answer 3

You must use multibyte-Functions for all Multibyte encoders! I assume mb_split is the pendant:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-split.php

Answer 4

as found at: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-split.php#107658

  function str_split_unicode($str, $l = 0) { if ($l > 0) { $ret = array(); $len = mb_strlen($str, "UTF-8"); for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i += $l) { $ret[] = mb_substr($str, $i, $l, "UTF-8"); } return $ret; } return preg_split("//u", $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY); } $word = 'withá'; $word = str_split_unicode($word); var_dump($word);