PHP : Proper way to get UTF-8 character or string length

Problem :

Was trying to get a length of an unicode(UTF-8) character with PHP. Trouble is, PHP echoes back 3, which is technically correct, but not accurate.

For example :

 <?php
 echo strlen('黄');
 ?>

will return 3 instead of 1. How to get PHP to count the unicode character as 1?

Diagnostic :

UTF-8 character is multi-byte and need to tell PHP to use the proper encoding to measure the length.

Solution :

Use mb_strlen() function with UTF-8 encoding to get the string length. For example :

 <?php
 echo mb_strlen('黄', 'UTF-8');
 ?>

Output :

1

which is accurate.

References :

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-strlen.php