What are the advantages of using multibyte string functions in PHP when dealing with international characters like umlauts?

When dealing with international characters like umlauts in PHP, using multibyte string functions is advantageous because they are specifically designed to handle characters that require more than one byte to represent. These functions can correctly manipulate and display multibyte characters without causing issues such as character splitting or encoding errors.

// Example of using multibyte string functions to handle umlauts
$umlautString = "Möglichkeiten";
$umlautLength = mb_strlen($umlautString);
echo "Length of string with umlauts: " . $umlautLength;