Based upon that snippet below using preg_match() I needed something faster and less specific. That function works and is brilliant but it scans the entire strings and checks that it conforms to UTF-8. I wanted something purely to check if a string contains UTF-8 characters so that I could switch character encoding from iso-8859-1 to utf-8.
I modified the pattern to only look for non-ascii multibyte sequences in the UTF-8 range and also to stop once it finds at least one multibytes string. This is quite a lot faster.
<?php
function detectUTF8($string)
{
return preg_match('%(?:
[\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF] # non-overlong 2-byte
|\xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF] # excluding overlongs
|[\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # straight 3-byte
|\xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF] # excluding surrogates
|\xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # planes 1-3
|[\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3} # planes 4-15
|\xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2} # plane 16
)+%xs', $string);
}
?>
