php / php/doc-en

Add grapheme_strlen() example for invalid UTF-8 input

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enhancement
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Description

Affected page

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.grapheme-strlen.php

Current issue

The grapheme_strlen() manual page currently documents the function signature as:

grapheme_strlen(string $string): int|false|null

However, the examples only show successful usage, and there is no example showing how to handle null or false.

This may be confusing because grapheme_strlen() expects a valid UTF-8 string. If the input contains invalid UTF-8 bytes, the function can return null.

For example:

<?php

$string = "\xFF";

var_dump(grapheme_strlen($string));

?>

output:

NULL

Users who are not familiar with invalid byte sequences may be confused by this behavior. They may expect a string length to always be returned when passing a PHP string.

Suggested improvement

Add an example showing how to handle a failure result and inspect the intl error code.

For example:

<?php

$string = "\xFF";

$length = grapheme_strlen($string);

if (!is_int($length)) {
    $code = intl_get_error_code();

    printf(
        "grapheme_strlen() failed: %s (%d)\n",
        intl_error_name($code),
        $code
    );
} else {
    echo $length, PHP_EOL;
}

?>

Expected output:

grapheme_strlen() failed: U_INVALID_CHAR_FOUND (10)

A short explanation could be added before the example:

grapheme_strlen() expects a valid UTF-8 string. If the function does not return an integer, the intl error functions can be used to inspect the ICU error code.
Additional context (optional)

The null return value can be demonstrated with invalid UTF-8 input, for example grapheme_strlen("\xFF").

The false return path appears to be much harder to reproduce from ordinary userland input, because it seems to correspond to an internal failure during grapheme boundary processing, such as ICU break iterator initialization. Therefore, the proposed example uses !is_int($length) to handle both null and false, while using invalid UTF-8 as the reproducible failure case.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Open the affected grapheme_strlen() manual page and review its existing examples and documented return values. Add the invalid UTF-8 failure example, the short explanation, and the expected ICU error output; the page is done when it shows how to inspect non-integer results with the intl error functions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
php
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
58/100

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