So I have an array of strings, and all of the strings are using the system default ANSI encoding and were pulled from a SQL database. So there are 256 different possible character byte values (single byte encoding).
Is there a way I can get json_encode()
to work and display these characters instead of having to use utf8_encode()
on all of my strings and ending up with stuff like \u0082
?
Or is that the standard for JSON?
Is there a way I can get json_encode() to work and display these characters instead of having to use utf8_encode() on all of my strings and ending up with stuff like "\u0082"?
If you have an ANSI encoded string, using utf8_encode()
is the wrong function to deal with this. You need to properly convert it from ANSI to UTF-8 first. That will certainly reduce the number of Unicode escape sequences like \u0082
from the json output, but technically these sequences are valid for json, you must not fear them.
json_encode
works with UTF-8
encoded strings only. If you need to create valid json
successfully from an ANSI
encoded string, you need to re-encode/convert it to UTF-8
first. Then json_encode
will just work as documented.
To convert an encoding from ANSI
(more correctly I assume you have a Windows-1252
encoded string, which is popular but wrongly referred to as ANSI
) to UTF-8
you can make use of the mb_convert_encoding()
function:
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252");
Another function in PHP that can convert the encoding / charset of a string is called iconv
based on libiconv. You can use it as well:
$str = iconv("CP1252", "UTF-8", $str);
utf8_encode()
does only work for Latin-1
, not for ANSI
. So you will destroy part of your characters inside that string when you run it through that function.
Related: What is ANSI format?
For a more fine-grained control of what json_encode()
returns, see the list of predifined constants (PHP version dependent, incl. PHP 5.4, some constants remain undocumented and are available in the source code only so far).
As you wrote in a comment that you have problems to apply the function onto an array, here is some code example. It's always needed to first change the encoding before using json_encode
. That's just a standard array operation, for the simpler case of pdo::fetch()
a foreach
iteration:
while($row = $q->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC))
{
foreach($row as &$value)
{
$value = mb_convert_encoding($value, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252");
}
unset($value); # safety: remove reference
$items[] = array_map('utf8_encode', $row );
}