While proper description is linked already in neighbouring comment.
TLDR: in 2024 with PHP8 you still need mbstring extension and also you should be careful around UTF-8 if you do any text processing. In almost all other modern programming languages it's just works.
TLDR: in 2024 with PHP8 you still need mbstring extension and also you should be careful around UTF-8 if you do any text processing. In almost all other modern programming languages it's just works.