I believe so - most (all?) string functions have an mb_ equivalent, for working on multibyte strings. Regular PHP strings are actually pretty great, since you

I believe so - most (all?) string functions have an mb_ equivalent, for working on multibyte strings. Regular PHP strings are actually pretty great, since you can treat them like byte arrays. Fun fact: PHPs streaming API has an “in-memory” option and it’s… just a string under the hood. Just don’t forget to use multibyte functions when you’re handling things like user input.