You can use grapheme_strlen() to count emojis as a single character:
<?php
echo strlen('🏴'); //28 - oh no
echo mb_strlen('🏴'); // - closer, but no
echo grapheme_strlen('🏴'); //1 - Bingo
?>
(PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PHP 7, PHP 8, PECL intl >= 1.0.0)
grapheme_strlen — Get string length in grapheme units
Procedural style
Get string length in grapheme units (not bytes or characters)
stringThe string being measured for length. It must be a valid UTF-8 string.
Example #1 grapheme_strlen() example
<?php
$char_a_ring_nfd = "a\xCC\x8A"; // 'LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE' (U+00E5) normalization form "D"
$char_o_diaeresis_nfd = "o\xCC\x88"; // 'LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS' (U+00F6) normalization form "D"
print grapheme_strlen( 'abc' . $char_a_ring_nfd . $char_o_diaeresis_nfd . $char_a_ring_nfd);
?>The above example will output:
6
Example #2 Handling invalid UTF-8 input
grapheme_strlen() returns null or false on failure, including
when the input is not valid UTF-8.
Use intl_get_error_code() and intl_error_name()
to retrieve the ICU error details.
<?php
$string = "\xFF"; // invalid UTF-8 byte sequence
$length = grapheme_strlen($string);
if (!is_int($length)) {
$code = intl_get_error_code();
printf("grapheme_strlen() failed: %s (%d)\n", intl_error_name($code), $code);
} else {
echo $length, PHP_EOL;
}
?>The above example will output:
grapheme_strlen() failed: U_INVALID_CHAR_FOUND (10)
You can use grapheme_strlen() to count emojis as a single character:
<?php
echo strlen('🏴'); //28 - oh no
echo mb_strlen('🏴'); // - closer, but no
echo grapheme_strlen('🏴'); //1 - Bingo
?>