John Davidson

Message:

I'm working on a custom PHP config file parser. It should convert this line:

db.name.external = "test­"

into an array:

array(1) {

  ["db"]=>

  array(1) {

    ["name"]=>

    array(1) {

      ["external"]=>

      string(4) "test"

    }

  }

}

If there's a soft hyphen in the value, var_dump returns the wrong string count - it adds +1 to the string length. PHPStorm shows the correct length.

PHPStorm Screenshot

I guess it's an encoding issue, any ideas?

---

My Answer:
It seems like the issue might be related to how PHP handles special characters like the soft hyphen. In some cases, PHP may count certain special characters as multiple characters, which can lead to discrepancies in string length calculations.

One possible solution is to use the mb_strlen function in PHP, which is specifically designed to handle multi-byte character encodings like UTF-8. By using mb_strlen instead of the regular strlen function, you may be able to get more accurate string length calculations, including for special characters like the soft hyphen.

Here's an example of how you could use mb_strlen in your code:

php
$value = "test­";
$length = mb_strlen($value, 'UTF-8');
var_dump($length); // This should output 4 instead of 5


By using mb_strlen with the UTF-8 encoding, you may be able to get more accurate string length calculations, even when dealing with special characters like the soft hyphen.