Currency symbol is not displaying properly in PHP

Currency symbol is not displaying properly. Below is my code:

$total = "₮50.40";
echo $total."<br>"; //output: ₮50.40

$str3 = substr($total, 0, 1);

echo $str3; //output: �

The variable $total is displaying correctly. But I extracted the symbol from $total and display it, unfortunately it shows � .

I want to display ₮ from variable $total. I tried utf8 encoding, but no luck.

Solution

The ₮ character is a multi-byte character, so you need to use mb_substr, not substr:

$total = "₮50.40";
$str3 = mb_substr($total, 0, 1);
echo $str3;

Output:

₮