Further reading PHP Manual: String Operations PHP Manual: String Functions strpos() strlen() substr() PHP Manual: Multibyte String Functions mb_strpos() mb_strlen() mb_substr() mb_internal_encoding() mb_http_output() htmlentities() htmlspecialchars() PHP UTF-8 Cheatsheet Stack Overflow: What factors make PHP Unicode-incompatible? Stack Overflow: Best practices in PHP and MySQL with international strings How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases Brining Unicode to PHP with Portable UTF-8