PHP strlen not capturing special characters

Asked Oct 19 '20 at 13:28

Active Oct 19 '20 at 13:28

Viewed 24 times

I have user data passed to an API, and sometimes it contains special characters such as:

” (written as ”)
“ (written as “)

And others. A lot of the special characters are produced with a user has an apostrophie, " or ', and can vary across the unicoding used.

When values are passed and then checked as such:

$string = "&rdquo; &ldquo;";

strlen($string);

Strlen will output them 2, but when they go into the database they count as 6. This causes breaking issues with limited fields like character varying.

Why is strlen not correctly getting the length and what would be a solution for special characters?

asked Oct 19 '20 at 13:28

Devin Dixon

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Use str replace than strlen and replace again? – Kaede Oct 19 '20 at 13:30
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`$string = "” “"; print strlen($string);` outputs `15`. Not 2. And 15 is correct lenght of the string – AterLux Oct 19 '20 at 13:30
@AterLux you are right on your numbers. I was just trying to demonstrate the strln count and the db string length do not add up. – Devin Dixon Oct 19 '20 at 13:59

PHP strlen not capturing special characters

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