utf 8 - How to iterate UTF-8 string in PHP?

Question

How to iterate a UTF-8 string character by character using indexing?

When you access a UTF-8 string with the bracket operator $str[0] the utf-encoded character consists of 2 or more elements.

For example:

$str = "K?t";
$str[0] = "K";
$str[1] = "?";
$str[2] = "?";
$str[3] = "t";

but I would like to have:

$str[0] = "K";
$str[1] = "?";
$str[2] = "t";

It is possible with mb_substr but this is extremely slow, ie.

mb_substr($str, 0, 1) = "K"
mb_substr($str, 1, 1) = "?"
mb_substr($str, 2, 1) = "t"

Is there another way to interate the string character by character without using mb_substr?

Answer 1

Use preg_split. With "u" modifier it supports UTF-8 unicode.

$chrArray = preg_split('//u', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);