What are some common pitfalls when trying to count characters in PHP variables?

One common pitfall when trying to count characters in PHP variables is not taking into account multibyte characters, which can result in inaccurate character counts. To accurately count characters in PHP variables, you can use the `mb_strlen()` function, which handles multibyte characters properly. 

// Incorrect way to count characters
$string = "こんにちは"; // Japanese greeting with 5 characters
$incorrect_count = strlen($string); // Incorrectly counts 15 instead of 5

// Correct way to count characters using mb_strlen()
$correct_count = mb_strlen($string, 'UTF-8'); // Outputs 5
echo $correct_count;

Keywords

strlen mb_strlen character encoding multibyte strings unicode

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