Most efficient way to make PHP work with UTF-8?
I am working on a website with PHP 5 and MySQL 5. And I'm working on making it work with UTF-8. The biggest problem is having string functions that can handle UTF-8 characters.

I've done some research on ways to do that and so far, I have not been impressed. You have the mb string functions in PHP, for example. It seems like those functions can take a long time to execute and may still be buggy. Other approaches involve the use of already-created libraries, PHPUTF8. I'm not convinced that is the best approach, either.

Obviously, PHP's lack of support for UTF-8 makes it very "noob" in this area. But all these workarounds seem to lack a sort of universal approach to the problem, as well. In a normal language, you would not need to use special string functions on UTF-8 strings. You would have one function (not two - i.e. strlen and mb_strlen) that would deal with all sorts of strings, instead. Granted, though, it is still important to have functions that deal exclusively with characters that never take up any more or any less than one byte.

Anyways, I'm curious if anyone here may know of a more "universal approach" to dealing with the PHP UTF-8 issue.

Furthermore, I have noticed that Wordpress seems to deal very well with UTF-8. Are they doing something unique in this area?
Most efficient way to make PHP work with UTF-8?
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I am working on a website with PHP 5 and MySQL 5. And I'm working on making it work with UTF-8. The biggest problem is having string functions that can handle UTF-8 characters.

I've done some research on ways to do that and so far, I have not been impressed. You have the mb string functions in PHP, for example. It seems like those functions can take a long time to execute and may still be buggy. Other approaches involve the use of already-created libraries, PHPUTF8. I'm not convinced that is the best approach, either.

Obviously, PHP's lack of support for UTF-8 makes it very "noob" in this area. But all these workarounds seem to lack a sort of universal approach to the problem, as well. In a normal language, you would not need to use special string functions on UTF-8 strings. You would have one function (not two - i.e. strlen and mb_strlen) that would deal with all sorts of strings, instead. Granted, though, it is still important to have functions that deal exclusively with characters that never take up any more or any less than one byte.

Anyways, I'm curious if anyone here may know of a more "universal approach" to dealing with the PHP UTF-8 issue.

Furthermore, I have noticed that Wordpress seems to deal very well with UTF-8. Are they doing something unique in this area?