mb_strtoupper() returns str with all alphabetic characters converted to uppercase.
encoding specifies the encoding of str; if omitted, the internal character encoding value will be used.
By contrast to strtoupper(), 'alphabetic' is determined by the Unicode character properties. Thus the behaviour of this function is not affected by locale settings and it can convert any characters that have 'alphabetic' property, such as a-umlaut (ä).
For more information about the Unicode properties, please see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr21/.
See also strtoupper(), mb_strtolower() and mb_convert_case().