What is the significance of using mb_substr in PHP when dealing with strings and bytes?
When dealing with strings and bytes in PHP, it is important to consider multibyte characters, as they can be represented by more than one byte. Using the `mb_substr` function in PHP ensures that multibyte characters are handled correctly when extracting substrings from a string. This function takes into account the character encoding of the string, allowing for accurate substring extraction without cutting off multibyte characters.
// Example of using mb_substr to extract a substring from a string with multibyte characters
$string = "こんにちは世界"; // Japanese greeting "Hello World"
$substring = mb_substr($string, 0, 5, 'UTF-8'); // Extract first 5 characters
echo $substring; // Output: こんにちは