Lol what a surprise..

There are mb_strlen() and mb_substr() for multibyte characters however there is no mb_str_word_count. Hence my previous post.

Always check for local time Despite the fact that my server timezone was set correctly, somehow time() was giving wrong ( UTC) hour. So i ended up using wp’s functions to make sure. $now = current_time( ‘timestamp’, 0 ) ;$local_ts = get_the_time(‘U’,$post->ID);