Avoiding problems with the updated mbstring extension
The mbstring extension was first introduced in PHP 4 and has been an active part of the language ever since. The original purpose of this extension was to provide support for the various Japanese character-encoding systems. Since that time, support for a wide variety of other encodings has been added—most notably, support for encodings based upon Universal Coded Character Set 2 (UCS-2), UCS-4, Unicode Transformation Format 8 (UTF-8), UTF-16, UTF-32, Shift Japanese Industrial Standards (SJIS), and International Organization for Standardization 8859 (ISO-8859), among others.
If you aren't sure which encodings are supported on your server, just run the mb_list_encodings() command, as follows (partial output shown):
root@php8_tips_php7 [ /repo/ch07 ]#
php -r "var_dump(mb_list_encodings());"
Command line code:1:
array(87) {
... only selected output is shown ...
[14] => ...