To deal with multibyte characters and encodings (such as Japanese and Korean) you may use the %mbstring% extension. Support for ASCII, JIS, Shift-JIS, EUC-(JP|CN|TW|KR), UTF8, Big5, CP866, CP936, CP1251, Koi8r encodings Replacement for many of PHP's standard string handling functions. Multibyte regular expressions Transparent encoding handlers via PHP's output handling mechanism