encoding to UTF8 for JSON result using php

Question

I have been trying to solve this for more than a week.

I have a MySQL database utf8_general_ci.

When I print the result in JSON formate using php, the characters are not UTF8 encoded.

The values stored in the database are in arabic language

Here is the code I'm using

db.php

<?php

$DBhost = "xx.xx.xx.x";
$DBusername = "username";
$DBpassword = "password";
$db_name = "bdname";

$connect = mysql_connect("$DBhost", "$DBusername", "$DBpassword")or die("cannot connect");
mysql_select_db("$db_name")or die("cannot select DB");

?>

and code to print the results are

Show.php

<?php
include('db.php');

$tbl_name = "table_name";

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

$sth = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $tbl_name");

$rows = array();

while($r = mysql_fetch_assoc($sth)) {
    $rows[] = array_map('utf8_encode', $r);
}

print json_encode($rows);
?>

Example of the output:

[{"id":"4","news_id":"1","caption":"\u00c3\u0083\u00c3\u008e\u00c3\u0088\u00c3\u0087\u00c3\u0091 \u00c3\u0087\u00c3\u00a1\u00c3\u0088\u00c3\u0098\u00c3\u00a6\u00c3\u00a1\u00c3\u0089 \u00c3\u0087\u00c3\u00a1\u00c3\u00a3\u00c3\u008f\u00c3\u0091\u00c3\u0093\u00c3\u00ad\u00c3\u0089 \u00c3\u0087\u00c3\u00a1\u00c3\u008e\u00c3\u0087\u00c3\u00a3\u00c3\u0093\u00c3\u0089 \u00c3\u00a1\u00c3\u009f\u00c3\u0091\u00c3\u0089 \u00c3\u0087\u00c3\u00a1\u00c3\u009e\u00c3\u008f\u00c3\u00a3"

What I understood from my search that the /u00 is a latin1 and the UTF8 should start with /u0 not two 0.

Tried different methods for converting latin1 to UTF8 like iconv and decode_json , changing the mysql_set_charset to latin1 and even removing it, added html header using UTF8,latin1 and windows-1526 charset also the same results and sometime i get null result for the caption output.

I'm out of options here and really don't know what to do

any idea ?

have you tested the mbstring functions, http://php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php, or a good tutorial http://www.ar-php.org/faq-php-arabic.html — Jérôme Teisseire, Oct 01 '14 at 09:37
Do those escape sequences represent the *wrong* characters or do you just want to use different escape sequences to represent non-ASCII characters? — Quentin, Oct 01 '14 at 09:41
@JérômeTeisseire what tutorial link is not working, and didn't understand what to do from the other link, can you please explain how to do the test ? — aLFaRSi, Oct 01 '14 at 09:49
@aLFaRSi — It's currently in ASCII, which is a subset of UTF-8, so it is in UTF-8. — Quentin, Oct 01 '14 at 09:55
@Quentin then why i'm not seeing the characters in arabic language ? how can i fix this please ? — aLFaRSi, Oct 01 '14 at 09:57
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23322312/php-json-encodestring-json-unescaped-unicode-not-escaping-czech-chars — Prashant Tapase, Oct 01 '14 at 10:03

oscarAguayo · Answer 1 · 2015-09-10T20:06:11.713

3

Include the next header in your .php file

<?php
header('Content-type: application/json; charset=UTF-8');
...

and add 'JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE' in your json_encode

echo json_encode($response, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);

Be sure to remove the utf8_encode() unnecessary.

edited Sep 10 '15 at 20:06

answered Sep 10 '15 at 19:56

oscarAguayo

181
1
7

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 01 '14 at 09:38

0

When you use mysql_set_charset('utf8'); you get utf-8 encoded data from MySQL databse. Don't usearray_map('utf8_encode', $r) on this data - this is your mistake. Correct one is:

while($r = mysql_fetch_assoc($sth)) {
    $rows[] = $r;
}

answered Oct 01 '14 at 09:38

Rimas

5,904
2
26
38

encoding to UTF8 for JSON result using php

2 Answers2