Since not all hosted servces currently support the multi-byte function set, it may still be necessary to process Unicode strings using standard single byte functions. The function at the following link - http://www.kanolife.com/escape/2006/03/php-unicode-processing.html - shows by example how to do this. While this only covers UTF-8, the standard PHP function "iconv" allows conversion into and out of UTF-8 if strings need to be input or output in other encodings.