What is the significance of the u-modifier in regular expressions when dealing with UTF-8 characters in PHP?

The u-modifier in regular expressions in PHP is significant when dealing with UTF-8 characters because it tells PHP to treat the input string as UTF-8 encoded. This is important because without the u-modifier, PHP will treat each byte as a separate character, which can lead to incorrect results when working with multi-byte UTF-8 characters. 

// Example of using the u-modifier in a regular expression to correctly match UTF-8 characters
$input = "Café";
$pattern = '/\p{L}+/u'; // Match one or more Unicode letters
if (preg_match($pattern, $input, $matches)) {
    echo "Match found: " . $matches[0];
} else {
    echo "No match found";
}

Keywords

u-modifier regular expressions UTF-8 characters PHP significance

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