How to install PHP `mbstring` extension in Ubuntu?

Question

What is the PHP mbstring extension, and what is the best way to install it on Ubuntu 14.04?

Answer 1

EDIT: Dylan Pierce has confirmed that you can already install some PHP 7 extensions in the same way you would for PHP 5. For mbstring in particular, you can execute:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring

To complement sparkmood's answer, this now works for PHP 7 if you already imported ondrej's PPA for it.

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.0

Don't forget, either PHP 7 is available through ubuntu's official repositories or you will need an external PPA.

Answer 2

mbstring is built in libapache2-mod-php5 package, so you can use this command for installing :

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

As described in package details :

 dba dom ereg exif fileinfo filter ftp gettext hash iconv json libxml
 mbstring mhash openssl pcre Phar posix Reflection session shmop SimpleXML
 soap sockets SPL standard sysvmsg sysvsem sysvshm tokenizer wddx xml
 xmlreader xmlwriter zip zlib.

Answer 3

sudo apt-get install php-mbstring

I have installed mbstring in php7.0-fpm (7.0.15-0ubuntu0.16.04.4)

Answer 4

In my case it was already installed, but I just needed to do phpenmod mbstring, followed by apachectl graceful.

Answer 5

If you're using php 5.6

Install php 5.6 mbstring package:

sudo apt-get install php5.6-mbstring

Then add the following line to the bottom of your php.ini file:

extension=php5.6-mbstring.so

Restart apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

---

To find your php.ini file, create a file and insert the following line:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Then open with a browser to see where your php.ini file is located.

Answer 6

For Ubuntu 14.04 extension mbstring should be built in.

For Ubuntu 16.04:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring

See also Introduction to Multibyte String