As mentioned above, only ASCII characters from 32 to 126 are considered printable, all others, including UTF-8 encoded characters are always considered unprintable, no matter what your locale settings are. Therefore, e.g. German "ä", the Euro sign "€" or the British pound symbol "£" will never be printable. If you need to check any characters for "printability" beyond the standard ASCII range, use a regular expression or write a specific function yourself.
See also this discussion:
Anonymous ¶12 years ago
Only ascii 32 thru 126 (inclusive) are considered printable. Tab (ascii 7), carriage return (ascii 13), linefeed (ascii 10) etc may produce output but are not considered printable.
harry at upmind dot com ¶
3 years ago
You can use this function to detect if a string is "binary".
<?php
/**
* Determine whether the given value is a binary string by checking to see if it contains only printable characters.
*
* @param string $value
*
* @return bool
*/
function isBinary($value): bool
{
/ remove "unprintable" whitespace characters (tabs, newlines etc)
$string = preg_replace('/\s/', '', (string)$value);
return !empty($string) && !ctype_print($string);
}
?>