在PHP中引用多字节字符串的最简单方法是什么？

Question

My question: In PHP it is easy to reference the single byte string, $single = "abc"; for example,

echo $single[0]; //"a"

However for the multibyte string $multi = "äåö" , I get "nonsense", that is,

echo $multi[0]; //?

I know one can reference the individual letters of a multi byte string by coding as follows:

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
echo mb_substr($multi,1,1);//which gives the right answer "å"

But isn't there an easier way to do this? I am especially looking for a way where I can reference the multi byte string with square brackets and just one parameter as for the single byte case.

Answer 1

No, Unicode support is on the table for new versions, but it is not ready yet. It will get there at some point presumably, but not yet.

from the manual :

A string is series of characters, where a character is the same as a byte. This means that PHP only supports a 256-character set, and hence does not offer native Unicode support.

The closest you could get to this is implementing an object implementing ArrayAccess using a __toString() function and a LOT of fiddling. Not recommended in my opinion.