phpunicodeutf-8preg-matchpcre

Get multibyte character count before match with preg_match() (PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE parameter is unhelpfully counting bytes)

I'm trying to search a UTF8-encoded string using preg_match.

preg_match('/H/u', "\xC2\xA1Hola!", $a_matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
echo $a_matches[0][1];

This should print 1, since "H" is at index 1 in the string "¡Hola!". But it prints 2. So it seems like it's not treating the subject as a UTF8-encoded string, even though I'm passing the "u" modifier in the regular expression.

I have the following settings in my php.ini, and other UTF8 functions are working:

mbstring.func_overload = 7
mbstring.language = Neutral
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.http_input = pass
mbstring.http_output = pass
mbstring.encoding_translation = Off

Any ideas?

Solution

  • Looks like this is a "feature", see http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=37391

    'u' switch only makes sense for pcre, PHP itself is unaware of it.

    From PHP's point of view, strings are byte sequences and returning byte offset seems logical (i don't say "correct").