Enables multibyte code in the language parser and scanner to be executed. When PHP is compiled with this option, it also enables the encoding directive in the declare construct.php.net/manual/en/configure.about.php
Enables parsing of source files in multibyte encodings. Enabling zend.multibyte is required to use character encodings like SJIS, BIG5, etc that contain special characters in multibyte string data. ISO-8859-1 compatible encodings like UTF-8, EUC, etc do not require this option.www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.zend.multibyte