There are simple way to get a character from multibyte string in PHP?
This is my problem: My language (Portuguese) uses ISO-8859-1 char encoding! When I want access a character from a string like 'coração' (heart) I use:

	mb_internal_encoding('ISO-8859-1');
	$str = "coração";

	$len = mb_strlen($str,'UTF-8');

	for($i=0;$i<$len;++$i)
		echo mb_substr($str, $i, 1, 'UTF-8')."<br/>";

This produces:

<pre>
c
o
r
a
ç
ã
o
</pre>

This works fine... But my issue is if the use of mb_substr function is not fast as simple string normal access! But I want a simple way to do this.... like in normal string character access: echo $str[$pos].... It is possible? 

There are simple way to get a character from multibyte string in PHP?
===

This is my problem: My language (Portuguese) uses ISO-8859-1 char encoding! When I want access a character from a string like 'coração' (heart) I use:

	mb_internal_encoding('ISO-8859-1');
	$str = "coração";

	$len = mb_strlen($str,'UTF-8');

	for($i=0;$i<$len;++$i)
		echo mb_substr($str, $i, 1, 'UTF-8')."<br/>";

This produces:

<pre>
c
o
r
a
ç
ã
o
</pre>

This works fine... But my issue is if the use of mb_substr function is not fast as simple string normal access! But I want a simple way to do this.... like in normal string character access: echo $str[$pos].... It is possible? 
