$foo = ‘same_string’;

isset($foo{4}) == isset($foo[4]) but in PHP6 corect is isset($foo[4])

echo mb_strlen($fu, ‘UTF-8′);

I had to specify the encoding because it didn’t automatically recognise it…

I tested when saving my document as ISO-8859-15 (norwegian) and (UTF-8). The results:

$fu = ‘æøå’;
echo strlen($fu); // 8859-15: length 3, UTF-8: length 6;
echo mb_strlen($fu); // 8859-15: length 3, UTF-8: length 6 (<–shouldn’t this be 3?);
echo (isset($fu[4])) ? ‘yes’ . $fu[4] : ‘no’; // 8859-15: ‘no’, UTF-8: ‘yesÃ’;

So, honestly, it didn’t work either way … Maybe my PHP isn’t compiled with mb_*** support?

I would assume that isset($string{100}) is counting Bytes, which would cause problems with out UTF-8 dilema.

Perhaps combined with a call to utf8_decode() it could work, but then that could be more expensive than using mb_stlen()…

All interesting though, I’ve never seen isset() used like that, and I’m surprised that it is not mentioned in the comments on the PHP site on either isset() or strlen().

strlen() is one of most expensive functions so if You want find out if string has more than 100 chars You can do:

if (isset($string{100})) {
echo ‘String is longer than 10 chars’;
}

isset() is not a function – it’s language construct – so it works faster than usually functions and isset() doesn’t have to count all $string one by one char.

I’m not sure why you think that would work, since isset() only returns true or false.

http://php.net/isset

Perhaps you have misunderstood? Or maybe there is another way to use isset() which you can elaborate on )