PHP strlen() Not Working Correctly??

PHP strlen() Not Working Correctly Because Single or Double Quotes - How to Get Correct strlen() PHP

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If you have a string and the function strlen() in PHP seems to be returning a str length greater than it actually is, does your string have either single and/or double quotes ', " ??.

The reason is most likely because you previously called a string cleaning function to sanitize the string, ie htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') which converted single quotes ' in the string to ' or ' and double quotes " were converted to " or ".

A suggested solution is to use the html_entity_decode() which may or may NOT work.

The solution is to manually replace these html entities yourself. The code below uses 2 small functions to do this for you.

The first function simplifies replace multiple items in a string at the same time and the second function then uses this function to properly convert the string so you get an accurate return on the built in PHP strlen() function.

/**************************************************************************
FUNCTION TO PERFORM str_replace FUNCTION MULTIPLE TIMES
[$arrFind] IS THE ARRAY OF STRINGS TO FIND
[$arrReplace] IS THE ARRAY OF WHAT TO REPLACE EACH ITEM WITH IN [$arrFind]
[$source] IS THE STRING TO PERFORM MULTIPLE REPLACEMENTS
***************************************************************************/
function replace_bulk($arrFind, $arrReplace, $source){

// THERE MUST BE SAME NUMBER OF ITEMS IN [$arrFind] AND [$arrReplace]
 $num[0] = count($arrFind);
 $num[1] = count($arrReplace);
 
 if($num[0] != $num[1]){
      return false;
 }
 
 $out = $source;
 
 for($i = 0; $i < $num[0]; $i++){
     $out = str_replace($arrFind[$i], $arrReplace[$i], $out);
 }
 
 return $out;
}

// FUNCTION TO CHECK TEXT LENGTH
function text_len($str){
    
    // DECODE STRING BECAUSE CHARACTERS LIKE ' OR " CAN RUIN STRLEN FUNCTION
   $arrfind = ['&#39;', ''', '&#34;', '"'];
   $arreplace = ["'", "'", '"', '"'];
   $temp = replace_bulk($arrfind, $arreplace, $str);

return strlen($temp);
}

// TO GET CORRECT LENGTH OF TEXT THAT CONTAINS SINGLE OR DOUBLE QUOTES
echo text_len($str);

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