PHP After substr, characters appear in the string � What is it?

Question

Laravel

I truncate the string substr , before that var_dump shows that it is a simple string without any characters.
But after, for example, in laravel , nothing was displayed through the blade . I broke my head why. But then I brought it out through echo and saw this there:
text text text �
How so? Where does it come from?

Answer 1

Perhaps you are cutting off the Cyrillic alphabet. It is better to use mb_substr for it. Because Cyrillic characters take up more space, and a regular substr can cut off half of the letter, which, of course, will not be displayed correctly.

Answer 2

Convert text from utf-8 to windiws-1251, cut text, then translate back (from windiws-1251 to utf-8)

$text='Строка';
$short = iconv('UTF-8','windows-1251',$text); 
$short = substr($short ,0,2); 
$short = iconv('windows-1251','UTF-8',$short ); 

echo $short;