php json_encode(): "Malformed UTF-8 characters" despite no unusual characters

Question

I have a script which creates an array containing entries for a table that I'd like to encode as json to send to my app. Each entry is an associative array of k/v pairs of string=>string|int. The code to generate the full array is as follows:

$entries = [];
foreach($stats as $i => $stat){
 $playerStats = new Player_Stats($stat);
 $entry = [
 'place' => $i,
 'name' => $playerStats->name(),
 'elo' => $playerStats->currentRating(),
 'highest' => $playerStats->highRating(),
 'masterPoints' => $playerStats->onlineMasterPoints(),
 'winLose' => $playerStats->matchesWonLost(),
 'winRate' => $playerStats->winPercent(),
 'numEvents' => $playerStats->numEvents(),
 'wins' => $playerStats->eventsWon(),
 'placed' => $playerStats->eventsPlaced()
 ];
 $entries[] = $entry;
}
$result = json_encode($entries);

When I do a count or vardump etc on entries, It clearly shows that its been properly filled with the correct data. json_encode() returns false however. Using json_last_error_msg(), I get the UTF-8 error in the title: Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded. All of the other posts on this issue I could find involved characters from other languages. All of the content in this array is made of the english alphabet and numbers, all ascii characters let alone utf-8.

Am I just missing something trivial (I usually am) or should I be looking for or trying something else completely?

• Al-Amin: can you provide us the payload for which you are getting error ?

Answer 1

You could use the option to ignore these, JSON_INVALID_UTF8_IGNORE so your code would be json_encode($data, JSON_INVALID_UTF8_IGNORE);

This will ignore invalid UTF-8 as the name describes. You can see all options for json_encode here. https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php

• Josh Bonnick: Normally, I would agree, but in this context I would debate that the error being character encoding, you could use the ignore option on json_encode until you find the root of your issue.
• cebo: This did stop the errors from occuring but it hasn't fixed the underlying issue. I have gone and traced down a single occurence of the issue and it turns out there are a couple odd characters in the data, but they're all unicode characters, this particular case being an ñ

Answer 2

Something like this could do the trick:

$result = json_encode(array_map(utf8_encode, $entries))