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There are multibyte string functions in PHP to handle multibyte string (e.g:CJK script). For example, I want to count how many letters in a multi bytes string by using len function in python, but it return an inaccurate result (i.e number of bytes in this string)

japanese = "桜の花びらたち"
print japanese
print len(japanese)#return 21 instead of 7

Is there any package or function like mb_strlen in PHP?

hungneox
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    For the completeness: This is no longer a problem in Python 3 with native Unicode support on all strings. – poke Dec 01 '11 at 18:55

2 Answers2

9

Use Unicode strings:

# Encoding: UTF-8

japanese = u"桜の花びらたち"
print japanese
print len(japanese)

Note the u in front of the string.

To convert a bytestring into Unicode, use decode: "桜の花びらたち".decode('utf-8')

Petr Viktorin
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3

Try converting it to unicode first:

print len(japanese.decode("utf-8"))

gives 7. You are working on the utf-8 encoded string, which indeed has 21 bytes.

Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse
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  • UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-6: ordinal not in range(128) :( – hungneox Dec 01 '11 at 18:55
  • To remove the error:
    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-6: ordinal not in range(128) :(
    Add the following hashed line:
    # Encoding: UTF-8
     – agathodaimon Jun 29 '17 at 08:34