Any Way to Return PHP 'Json_Encode' With Encode Utf-8 and Not Unicode

Any way to return PHP `json_encode` with encode UTF-8 and not Unicode?

{"a":"\u00e1"} and {"a":"á"} are different ways to write the same JSON document; The JSON decoder will decode the unicode escape.

In php 5.4+, php's json_encode does have the JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE option for plain output. On older php versions, you can roll out your own JSON encoder that does not encode non-ASCII characters, or use Pear's JSON encoder and remove line 349 to 433.

Why does the PHP json_encode function convert UTF-8 strings to hexadecimal entities?

Since PHP/5.4.0, there is an option called JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE. Check it out:

https://php.net/function.json-encode

Therefore you should try:

json_encode( $text, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE );

json_encode() non utf-8 strings?

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.

Converting ANSI to UTF-8 with PHP

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);

Note on utf8_encode()

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.

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Related: What is ANSI format?

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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).

Changing the encoding of an array/iteratively (PDO comment)

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 );
}

PHP json_encode json_decode UTF-8

This is an encoding issue. It looks like at some point, the data gets represented as ISO-8859-1.

Every part of your process needs to be UTF-8 encoded.

• The database connection

• The database tables

• Your PHP file (if you are using special characters inside that file as shown in your example above)

• The content-type headers that you output

Charset - json_encode with utf-8

When encoding unicode data with json_encode you should use the JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE flag:

$json = json_encode($darr, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE); 

The above is available since php 5.4.0.

For older versions you can try and use this function instead:

function unicode_json_encode($arr) {
        //convmap since 0x80 char codes so it takes all multibyte codes (above ASCII 127). So such characters are being "hidden" from normal json_encoding
        array_walk_recursive($arr, function (&$item, $key) { if (is_string($item)) $item = mb_encode_numericentity($item, array (0x80, 0xffff, 0, 0xffff), 'UTF-8'); });
        return mb_decode_numericentity(json_encode($arr), array (0x80, 0xffff, 0, 0xffff), 'UTF-8');
}

The above function was taken from the comments in json_encode page in php.net

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