PHP array_pop & implode show question mark when used with foreign language

Question

I'm using the following code to display only the last name first character on my Wordpress site:

$name = $comment->comment_author;
$separate = mb_split(" ", $name);
$last = array_pop($separate);
echo implode(' ', $separate)." ".$last[0].".";

It works great with English names, but $last[0] will return a question mark when used with a foreign language (e.g Arabic, Hebrew, Greek etc). For example:

Name: השם שלי

Will return:

השם ?.

I've been trying to fix this for an hour now, but nothing so far.

Any idea?

Answer 1

You can try to set the encoding (https://www.php.net/manual/ro/function.mb-internal-encoding.php) before using the mb_split function.