On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial showing you how to bring portable UT-8 support to PHP with the Portable-UTF8 library. UTF-8 handling has long been one thing desired in the core of PHP, but hasn't been introduced quite yet.

PHP’s lack of Unicode/multibyte support means that the standard string handling functions treat strings as a sequence of single-byte characters. In fact, the official manual defines a string in PHP as a “series of characters, where a character is the same as a byte.” PHP supports only 8-bit characters, while Unicode (and many other character sets) may require more than one byte to represent a character. This limitation of PHP affects almost all aspects of string manipulation, including (but not limited to) substring extraction, determining string lengths, string splitting, shuffling etc.

The article mentions some of the efforts in the past that have been made to try to introduce this functionality into the core, but was shelved at the time. Instead of waiting on this feature to be introduced, they show you how to use the library to do things like check for UTF-8 strings, "cleaning" the UTF-8 strings and do some validation on the string's contents.