Question: ```
<input type="text" id="title" name="title" size="50" maxlength="110" />

```

You see, the maxlength is 110, but I was shocked when I found that I input 114 characters when I used 

```
echo strlen($title);

```

Any idea?

By the way, what I input was **Japanese text**. What's wrong?

Answer: 
Japanese text is most probably using a multibyte character encoding. Therefore you should make use of [mb\_strlen()](http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-strlen.php). 

Best wishes,
Fabian
> 
> What's wrong?
> 
> 
> 

PHP's string handling, which is based on the assumption that 1 character = 1 byte and leaves it to the programmer to tyke care of encodings everywhere and remember to use the more recent mb\_\* functions whenever dealing with strings that may use multibyte encodings.