How to check if the word is Japanese or English using PHP

Question

I want to have different process for English word and Japanese word in this function

function process_word($word) {
   if($word is english) {
     /////////
   }else if($word is japanese) {
      ////////
   }
}

thank you

Answer 1

A quick solution that doesn't need the mb_string extension:

if (strlen($str) != strlen(utf8_decode($str))) {
    // $str uses multi-byte chars (isn't English)
}

else {
    // $str is ASCII (probably English)
}

Or a modification of the solution provided by @Alexander Konstantinov:

function isKanji($str) {
    return preg_match('/[\x{4E00}-\x{9FBF}]/u', $str) > 0;
}

function isHiragana($str) {
    return preg_match('/[\x{3040}-\x{309F}]/u', $str) > 0;
}

function isKatakana($str) {
    return preg_match('/[\x{30A0}-\x{30FF}]/u', $str) > 0;
}

function isJapanese($str) {
    return isKanji($str) || isHiragana($str) || isKatakana($str);
}

Answer 2

This function checks whether a word contains at least one Japanese letter (I found unicode range for Japanese letters in Wikipedia).

function isJapanese($word) {
    return preg_match('/[\x{4E00}-\x{9FBF}\x{3040}-\x{309F}\x{30A0}-\x{30FF}]/u', $word);
}