When I use substr() I get a strange character at the end
$articleText = substr($articleText,0,500);
I have an output of 500 chars and � <--
How can I fix this? Is it an encoding problem? My language is Greek.
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Have seen the same thing in (UK) English.alimack– alimack2014-08-25 11:03:32 +00:00Commented Aug 25, 2014 at 11:03
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7 Answers
substr is counting using bytes, and not characters.
greek probably means you are using some multi-byte encoding, like UTF-8 -- and counting per bytes is not quite good for those.
Maybe using mb_substr could help, here : the mb_* functions have been created specifically for multi-byte encodings.
3 Comments
Boris Delormas
Learning more and more every single day... Thank you stackoverflow !
ivkremer
Thank you very much. But as for me the main thing is to add
mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8"); before using mb_* functions. Without adding it I still see squares.
trejder
@Kremchik You won't see squares, if you use
mb_substr($short, 0, 75, 'utf-8'). Then you don't need to use mb_internal_encoding before mb_substr.Use mb_substr instead, it is able to deal with multiple encodings, not only single-byte strings as substr:
$articleText = mb_substr($articleText,0,500,'UTF-8');
3 Comments
Kent Munthe Caspersen
"UTF-8" as optional parameter worked for me. Keep in mind that you might also want to use mb_strlen() if you are using the string length to determine if it must be cut.
trejder
An alternative is to use
mb_internal_encoding('utf-8') before any mb_* command.Looks like you're slicing a unicode character in half there. Use mb_substr instead for unicode-safe string slicing.
1 Comment
trejder
...with calling
mb_internal_encoding('utf-8') before or with using 'utf-8' as fourth parameters of mb_substr. Doc says, that it is optional and when it is omitted, the internal character encoding value will be used, but the think is (explained somewhere else in PHP doc), that PHP's "internal encoding" in nearly always "something else" than your page encoding. So for slicing UTF8 string, this fourth parameter or calling mb_internal_encoding('utf-8') becomes required.use this function, It worked for me
function substr_unicode($str, $s, $l = null) {
return join("", array_slice(
preg_split("//u", $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY), $s, $l));
}
Credits: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-substr.php#107698
Comments
ms_substr() also works excellently for removing strange trailing line breaks as well, which I was having trouble with after parsing html code. The problem was NOT handled by:
trim()
or:
var_dump(preg_match('/^\n|\n$/', $variable));
or:
str_replace (array('\r\n', '\n', '\r'), ' ', $text)
Don't catch.
Comments
Alternative solution for UTF-8 encoded strings - this will convert UTF-8 to characters before cutting the sub-string.
$articleText = substr(utf8_decode($articleText),0,500);
To get the articleText string back to UTF-8, an extra operation will be needed:
$articleText = utf8_encode( substr(utf8_decode($articleText),0,500) );
answered Mar 30, 2013 at 17:15
Kristoffer Bohmann
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1 Comment
gre_gor
This doesn't work at all.
You are trying to cut unicode character.So i preferred instead of substr() try mb_substr() in php.
substr()
substr ( string $string , int $start [, int $length ] )
mb_substr()
mb_substr ( string $str , int $start [, int $length [, string $encoding ]] )
For more information for substr() - Credits => Check Here
