How to count touches (letters, spaces and symbols) in PHP?

Question

I made a program that extracts my annotations from my code and creates a file txt to be a little manual. I made a format to make it cooler:

+-----------+
|           |
| ESPECIAIS |
|           |
+-----------+

It takes the SPECIAL line and formats. Simple! It happens that some do not get well formatted because it has accented letters, and in this case I can not count the ringtones correctly. The line "FUNCTIONS" looks like this:

+-----------+
|           |
| FUNÇÕES |
|           |
+-----------+

This is because the string is formed by the codes 70|85|78|195|135|195|149|69|83 adding 9 characters by strlen PHP, since accents are using the prefix 195, extrapolating the count to 2.

This particular problem is not difficult to solve, but I would like to take advantage to understand the issue better. I don’t know how the encoding of accents works in this case (text file UTF-8).

In Javascript I count the touches using DOMElement.textContent.lenght which already comprises the string as text.

Is there a similar function in PHP?

Answer 1

The simplest solution is to use the function mb_strlen() that is prepared to handle characters multibyte as is the case with UTF-8.

mb_strlen("FUNÇÕES") // produz 7

Behold working in the ideone. And in the repl it.. Also put on the Github for future reference.