str_split() not working properly in PHP when using string with special characters

Question

I am trying out the following

$x = "126·10⁴";
$array = str_split($x);
echo "x = " . $x . "<br>";
echo "Array length: " . count($array) . "<br>";

 echo "Charset: " .mb_detect_encoding($x)."<br>";

foreach($array as $i)
    echo $i .  " ";

which gives as output:

x = 126·10⁴
Array length: 10
Charset: UTF-8
1 2 6 � � 1 0 � � �

I want the · and ⁴ to be 1 character in the array, how can this be done? What I am trying to reach is to iterate over all characters of a string, so any other solution is also welcome.

Answer 1

According to a comment in the PHP Manual (Thanks to @Rizier123), the proper way to do this is as following:

function str_split_unicode($str, $l = 0) {
    if ($l > 0) {
        $ret = array();
        $len = mb_strlen($str, "UTF-8");
        for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i += $l) {
            $ret[] = mb_substr($str, $i, $l, "UTF-8");
        }
        return $ret;
    }
    return preg_split("//u", $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
}