Are there any best practices or alternative methods to efficiently check the length of a string in PHP, apart from using the strlen() function?

When checking the length of a string in PHP, the most common method is to use the strlen() function. However, an alternative method to efficiently check the length of a string is by using the mb_strlen() function, which is specifically designed to handle multi-byte character encodings. This can be useful when working with strings that contain characters outside the ASCII range, such as emojis or special characters.

$string = "Hello, World!";
$length = mb_strlen($string);

echo "The length of the string is: " . $length;