It may not be clear whether PHP actually supports utf-8, which is the current de facto standard character encoding for Web documents, which supports most human languages. The good news is: it does.
I wrote a test program which successfully reads in a utf-8 file (without BOM) and manipulates the characters using mb_substr, mb_strlen, and mb_strpos (mb_substr should normally be avoided, as it must always start its search at character position 0).
The results with a variety of Unicode test characters in utf-8 encoding, up to four bytes in length, were mostly correct, except that accent marks were always mistakenly treated as separate characters instead of being combined with the previous character; this problem can be worked around by programming, when necessary.
