PHP character encoding issue ™ prints as â„¢

Question

I'm grabbing some json data from a URL like this one: https://steamcommunity.com/id/itemdepot3/inventory/json/730/2

$json = json_decode(file_get_contents(
"https://steamcommunity.com/id/itemdepot3/inventory/json/730/2"),true);

I'm then trying to print the names of each item:

foreach($json["rgInventory"] as $item){
    $cid = $item["classid"];
    $iid = $item["instanceid"];
    $name = $json["rgDescriptions"]["{$cid}_{$iid}"]["market_name"];        
    echo $name;
}

But the names which should include a ™ come out mangled like this:

StatTrakâ„¢ Five-SeveN | Nightshade (Field-Tested)

I've tried a bunch of goofy regex fixes (as this is the only character I need to fix) but to no avail. I have no idea what kind of encoding I'm dealing with here and all my searches have come up dry. How can I get my ™ symbols to print correctly?

Make sure your web page specifies that it's outputting UTF-8. — Phylogenesis, Mar 02 '15 at 14:41
@Phylogenesis I can't change anything about the source page, I'm just scraping data from it. — ReallyMadeMeThink, Mar 02 '15 at 14:54
I'm talking about your output. I suspect you're outputting UTF-8, but the browser thinks it's reading ISO-8859-1 or some such. Make sure you set the appropriate `Content-Type` header (either in the HTTP response, or via a meta tag). — Phylogenesis, Mar 02 '15 at 15:04
Works! Thanks a lot. Put your comment as an answer and I'll happily mark. — ReallyMadeMeThink, Mar 02 '15 at 15:10
possible duplicate of [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — deceze, Mar 02 '15 at 15:15

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 02 '15 at 15:14

As discussed in the comments above, you need to make sure you specify the correct output encoding.

The problem stems from the fact you were outputting UTF-8 characters, but your web browser was trying to decode the page as a single-byte character set (Most likely ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252).

Make sure that you always specify the output encoding via the appropriate use of HTTP headers (in this case Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8) or through the use of a <meta> tag.

PHP character encoding issue ™ prints as â„¢

1 Answers1