mbstring is missing for phpmyadmin in ubuntu 16.04

Question

When I installed phpmyadmin in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, it gives me an error mentioned below.

The mbstring extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration

then I tried to install php-mbstring, it says mbstring is up to date, Can anyone help me to solve this?

Answer 1

Please type in terminal:

sudo apt-get install php-mbstring php7.0-mbstring php-gettext libapache2-mod-php7.0

Then, restart apache2:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

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Still missing?

You need to explicitly enable the PHP mcrypt and mbstring extensions, which can do by typing:

sudo phpenmod mcrypt
sudo phpenmod mbstring

Then, restart apache2:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Done.
This has been reported here: PHPMyAdmin requires mbstring

Answer 2

If you want to use php 5.6 instead of php 7

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

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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 3

In my case, I finally found out that the PHP version that used by phpmyadmin is php5.6 (I have installed php7.0). I found this by executing phpinfo() in test.php then I had done this to make phpmyadmin work:

1. By using synaptic package manager, install php5.6,php5.6-mysql,php5.6-mbstring and php5.6-mcrypt
2. Make sure that extension=mbstring and extension=php_mysqli on /etc/php/5.6/apache2/php.ini is not commented
3. Finally, restart your apache sudo systemctl restart apache2

I still new at these but hope this works for you.