PHP strlen vs mb_strlen for UTF-8 characters
Jul 10, 2025 pm 12:59 PMstrlen is not suitable for counting UTF-8 characters because it calculates the number of bytes rather than characters; 1. For example, "Hello" occupies 6 bytes, but only 2 characters; 2. The mblen function needs to specify UTF-8 encoding to count correctly; 3. Not specifying the encoding or the file is not UTF-8 may cause errors; 4. You need to select strlen or mb_strlen according to actual needs; 5. Pay attention to the explicit declaration of extension loading and encoding when using it.
When processing UTF-8-encoded strings, there is a significant difference in behavior between strlen
and mb_strlen
in PHP. If you only use strlen
to count the number of Chinese, Japanese, or other multibyte characters, the results may confuse you.

Why is strlen
not suitable for counting UTF-8 characters?
strlen
is a native string length function in PHP, which calculates the number of bytes , not the number of characters. In UTF-8 encoding, a character may take up 1 to 4 bytes. For example:
- English letters (such as "a"): 1 byte
- Chinese characters (such as "中"): 3 bytes
- Certain special emojis (such as?): 4 bytes
So when you run:

echo strlen("Hello"); // Output 6
The output is 6, because "you" and "good" each occupy 3 bytes, with a total of 6 bytes, which is not an intuitive number of two characters.
mb_strlen
is the real way to count by character
Use mb_strlen
and specify the encoding as UTF-8 to correctly return the number of characters:

echo mb_strlen("Hello", "UTF-8"); // Output 2
This function will identify the actual boundary of each character according to UTF-8 encoding rules, thereby accurately counting the number of characters.
A few things to note:
- If no encoding is specified, some environments may use non-UTF-8 encoding methods (such as GBK or ISO-8859-1) by default, resulting in an error in the result.
- Make sure your script file is saved in UTF-8 format and avoid the strings in the source code being garbled.
How to choose in actual use?
- Only care about the number of bytes (such as limiting HTTP request size, database field length, etc.) → Use
strlen
- You need to count the number of characters that the user sees (such as inputting up to 10 characters for the user name, intercepting the first 5 Chinese characters, etc.) → Use
mb_strlen
For example:
$username = "Zhang Sanabc"; echo mb_strlen($username, "UTF-8"); // Output 5 (Picture, Three, A, B, C)
Beware of these pitfalls
- Some frameworks or libraries may not load
mbstring
extension by default. At this time, callingmb_strlen
will report an error. - Don't rely on the default encoding settings, it is recommended to pass
"UTF-8"
explicitly in every call. - When doing string interception, you should also use
mb_substr
instead ofsubstr
, otherwise garbled or truncated errors will also occur.
Basically that's it.
The above is the detailed content of PHP strlen vs mb_strlen for UTF-8 characters. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

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