Unicode was retrofitted into PHP and then the entire effort was abandoned, so yes, i think anything would be more elegant. PHP currently supports unicode in th

Unicode was retrofitted into PHP and then the entire effort was abandoned, so yes, i think anything would be more elegant. PHP currently supports unicode in the same way as lua or C - every string is a binary string. If you want correct UTF-8 behaviour in string functions then instead of using libc or string_ functions, you must pass the character set as an additional parameter to specialised mb_ string functions instead.