UTF-8 safe equivalent of ord or charCodeAt() in PHP

✔ Recommended Answer

ord() works byte per byte (as most of PHPs standard string functions - if not all). You would need to convert it your own, for example with the help of the multibyte string extension:

$utf8Character = 'Ą';list(, $ord) = unpack('N', mb_convert_encoding($utf8Character, 'UCS-4BE', 'UTF-8'));echo $ord; # 260

Source: stackoverflow.com

Answered By: hakre

Method #2

In PHP, the ord function returns the ASCII value of the first character of a string, but it may not work correctly with multibyte strings or UTF-8 encoded characters.

To safely get the Unicode code point of a character in a UTF-8 encoded string in PHP, you can use the mb_ord function, which is available from PHP 7.2 onwards. Here's an example:

php
$string = '€'; // UTF-8 encoded Euro symbol
$code_point = mb_ord($string, 'UTF-8');
echo $code_point; // Output: 8364

In this example, we use the mb_ord function to get the Unicode code point of the Euro symbol (€) in a UTF-8 encoded string. The function takes two parameters: the string to get the code point from, and the encoding of the string (in this case, UTF-8).

If you're using an older version of PHP that doesn't have the mb_ord function, you can use the unpack function with the 'N' format code to unpack a 32-bit unsigned integer from a binary string representing a UTF-8 encoded character. Here's an example:

php
$string = '€'; // UTF-8 encoded Euro symbol
$code_point = unpack('N', mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UCS-4BE', 'UTF-8'))[1];
echo $code_point; // Output: 8364

In this example, we first convert the UTF-8 encoded string to UCS-4BE encoding using the mb_convert_encoding function. We then use the unpack function with the 'N' format code to unpack a 32-bit unsigned integer from the binary string, and get the first element of the resulting array using [1] to get the code point.