Why doesn't PHP support unicode?

Question

PHP

Once I read somewhere a coder complained that PHP did not support unicode.
And this stuck in my mind. I didn’t catch up with what he was talking about, and then I somehow
forgot, and now somewhere again I came across a post that PHP began to
support Unicode. So what does that even mean?

Answer 1

Standard PHP functions treat strings as if they were single-byte strings.
Therefore, you do not need to use such functions.
There are mb_* functions and libraries for working with strings.

Answer 2

When did php support unicode?