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 our server, just run the mb_list_encodings() command, as follows:

Note: Click on the terminal below to get the encodings that are supported in PHP 8.

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