php.md

Count characters of a string in PHP

Code points

The mb_strlen function is available for strings in PHP 4.0.6 and requires the encoding of the string to either passed as the second argument or set in mbstring.internal_encoding.

$count = mb_strlen($str, 'UTF-8');

Grapheme clusters

The grapheme_strlen function is available for UTF-8 strings in PHP 5.3.0 or the PECL extension intl.

$count = grapheme_strlen($str);