Sage for not Unicode
>>155
Nope, if you're using the mbstring extension, you're treating whatever character set/encoding you chose, which for your own sake should be UTF-8, and substr, strlen, etc. will work accordingly. For UTF-8, you can also use preg_* if you specify the u flag. And thus, the only non-Unicode operation remaining in PHP is the one you probably want to leave as such - $a{n}, which gives you access to raw octets. (For string slicing use substr.)