Array to json with json_encode and back to text

Question

I retrieve data from a mysql database. I want to make this data available as json:

<?php
 $data = array();
 foreach($this->dataFromDb as $value){
 $data[] = $value;
 }
 $json = json_encode($data);
 echo $json;
?>

Unfortunately this produces null values in the json because e.g. $value['title'] may contain non utf-8 chars like €. To solve this I change this line.

$data[] = array_map(utf8_encode, $value);

But now I have strings like \u00 or \u0080 in the json output. How would I get my normal text like it is stored in db from the json? When I try

print_r(json_decode($json));

I again get strange chars like fÃ1⁄4r 599,95€.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You also have to utf8_decode() the data:

<?php
 $data = array();
 $arr[] = 'a';
 $arr[] = "\x80";
 print_r($arr);
 $data[] = array_map(utf8_encode, $arr);
 $json = json_encode($data);
 $decoded_json = json_decode($json);
 print_r($decoded_json);
 $decoded_data[] = array_map(utf8_decode, $decoded_json[0] );
 print_r($decoded_data);
?>

Answer 2

Use iconv to convert between charsets.

iconv("UTF-8", "CP1252", $data)

Answer 3

Use utf-8 charset per connection to the database.