iconv or mbstring?

Question

Which multibyte-handling library should I use : iconv or mbstring ?

After some Googling I didn't find enough arguments to convince me to use one particularly, and I could not get any benchmark (and I'm too lazy do create one :-p).

After all maybe this choice doesn't really matters ?

Thanks for any piece of advice.

Answer 1

I tend to use a combination of both - depending on my needs. I use iconv to convert from one charset to another, but mbstring for simpler operations like mb_strtoupper() and mb_stristr(). But if only one of the libraries is needed I suggest using mbstring purely for it's widespread functionalities and ease of use.