What are the best practices for handling multi-byte characters in PHP programming?

When working with multi-byte characters in PHP, it is important to use multibyte string functions to ensure proper handling of characters that span multiple bytes. This is especially important when dealing with languages that use characters outside of the ASCII range. One common issue is incorrectly counting the length of a string, as some multi-byte characters can be counted as multiple characters. To solve this, use multibyte string functions like mb_strlen() and mb_substr() to correctly handle multi-byte characters.

// Example of using multibyte string functions to handle multi-byte characters
$text = "こんにちは"; // Japanese greeting with 5 characters
echo mb_strlen($text); // Outputs: 5
echo mb_substr($text, 0, 3); // Outputs: こんに