PHP can Strlen be trusted for mission critical banking applications?
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i am wondering when i check the length of the string with strlen function in php 

it says its 32. however when i open that in a notepad or notepad++ i can see some empty spaces in the file (incorrect alignment with the other lines, 

**since i am doing a banking application strlen is critical to be 100% correct.**

i am just wondering should i keep trusting this output or should i moved to something else like

    mb_strlen

what is the best function to be trusted in normal ASCII character set ?
