PHP Japanese Strings getting set to?

I got it. I just had to set the mbstring extension settings to handle internal strings in UTF-8. Thas extension is standard with my build of PHP 5.3.0.

IMPORTANT

This answer is meant for situations where it's not possible to run/install the 'intl' extension, and only sorts strings by replacing accented characters to non-accented characters. To sort accented characters according to a specific locale, using a Collator is a better approach -- see the other answer to this question for more information.

Sorting by non-accented characters in PHP 5.2

You may try converting both strings to ASCII using iconv() and the //TRANSLIT option to get rid of accented characters;

$str1 = iconv('utf-8', 'ascii//TRANSLIT', $str1);

Then do the comparison

See the documentation here:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

[updated, in response to @Esailija's remark] I overlooked the problem of //TRANSLIT translating accented characters in unexpected ways. This problem is mentioned in this question: php iconv translit for removing accents: not working as excepted?

To make the 'iconv()' approach work, I've added a code sample below that strips all non-word characters from the resulting string using preg_replace().

<?php

setLocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR');

$names = array(
   'Zoey and another (word) ',
   'Émilie and another word',
   'Amber',
);


$converted = array();

foreach($names as $name) {
    $converted[] = preg_replace('#[^ws]+#', '', iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $name));
}

sort($converted);

echo '<pre>'; print_r($converted);

// Array
// (
//     [0] => Amber
//     [1] => Emilie and another word
//     [2] => Zoey and another word 
// )

You should change your file encoding to UTF-8 and set the header on the website to UTF-8.

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

in HTML5 you should use:

<meta charset="utf-8" /> 

or in php

header('content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');