Switch statement in PHP does not recognize special characters (i.e. UTF-8)!

I have one switch statement in my PHP code and it seems it doesn't execute case with the UTF-8 character even though value put to switch is UTF-8 character. It works with all other characters.

CO开发者_运维知识库DE:

echo $word[$i];

switch($word[$i]){

 case "a": echo "aaaa"; break;

 case "č": echo "aaaa"; break;
}

If the $word[$i] is "a" the code echoes "a" and "aaaa" if the $word[$i] is "č" the code echoes "č" but does not echo "aaaa". It simply ignores case with "č". I also tried case with single quotes.

If someone will someday need to use "str_split" for utf-8 strings here is working function:

function str_split_utf8 ($string, $split_length = 1)
{
 $length = (int) $split_length;
 $string = (string) $string;

if ($length < 1)
{
 return false;
}

return preg_split("/(.{{$length}})/us", $string, -1,
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
}