This function encodes the string
data to UTF-8, and
returns the encoded version. UTF-8
is a standard mechanism used by
Unicode for encoding wide
character values into a byte stream.
UTF-8 is transparent to plain
ASCII characters, is self-synchronized (meaning it is
possible for a program to figure out where in the bytestream
characters start) and can be used with normal string
comparison functions for sorting and such. PHP encodes UTF-8 characters in up to four bytes,
like this:
表格 1. UTF-8 encoding