Use mb_* functions

[softwarespot]

I am wandering whether it would be good to use multi-byte string functions by default or have a wrapper for both e.g. strlen and mb_strlen?

[hopeseekr]

Can you provide statistics on how common mb_string is deployed?

[softwarespot]

How would one be able to calculate this?

[peter-mw]

If you install any Linux they are not part of the php-common package and must be installed manually

Maybe you can check if they exist and use them if they are present

There is a library that makes a polyfill of mb_* https://github.com/voku/portable-utf8