PHP - JSON character encoding (YouTube API)

Question

I'm using the YouTube API to grab comments from videos in JSON, using the following code:

$url = 'https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/' . $video_id .'/comments?alt=json&max-results=50&v=2';
$comments = array();

$json   = file_get_contents($url);
$data   = json_decode($json, TRUE);

foreach($data["feed"]["entry"] as $item)
{
    array_push($comments, $item["content"]['$t']);
}

However there is some kind of character encoding problem as I keep getting 'ï»¿' in the comments - usually at the end of a sentence/comment.

Any ideas on how to read the JSON using the correct ASCII character encoding?

In the JSON response from Google '`\ufeff`' is being inserted into the comments. Not sure if this is being interrupted as '`ï»¿`' by `json_decode`... — cdrev, May 28 '13 at 14:57
BOM http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255993/how-do-i-remove-i-from-the-beginning-of-a-file — Danack, May 29 '13 at 11:13

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

Thank you to Danack for pointing out that it is a Byte Order Mark (BOM).

This is also deals with the same problem - How do I remove ï»¿ from the beginning of a file?

None of the solutions on there seemed to work, so I tackled it myself. Before going through json_decode, the special characters ï»¿ were simply \ufeff so I simple removed them before decoding.

$temp   = file_get_contents($json_url, 0, null, null);
$temp   = str_replace('\ufeff', '', $temp);     
$data   = json_decode($temp, TRUE);

PHP - JSON character encoding (YouTube API)

1 Answers1