How does PHP internally represent strings?
        Posted  
        
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                Jim Thio
            
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        Published on 2012-06-02T14:41:03Z
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            2012/06/02
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UTF8?
UTF16?
Do strings in PHP also keep track of the encoding used?
Let's look at this script for example. Say I run:
$original = "??????????????";
What actually happens?
Obviously I think $original will not contain just 7 characters. Those glyphs must each be represented by several bytes there.
Then I do:
$converted = mb_convert_encoding ($original , "UTF-8");
What will happen to $converted? How will $converted be different from $original?
Will it be just the exact same byte sequence as $original but with a different encoding?
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