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I am trying to work with the Amazon Associates API, but whenever trying to get the information of a product, the characters come out in a weird way.

Example
Text on the Amazon page: 【23800 mAh
Output of the JSON from the API: 🔥 ã€23800 mAh

Just like this, more weird characters are appearing, such as a dash transformation in a question mark.

I've used a code snippet in PHP that was provided by them, which contained the following line which determined the charset:
$awsv4->addHeader('content-type', 'application/json; charset=utf-8');

Does anyone have a pointer where I might be going wrong here, and what I could do to fix this weird conversion?

Remco Bravenboer
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  • what is the `Content-Type` header in HTTP headers of the Amazon page? – Example person Feb 04 '22 at 16:24
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    I assume Amazon uses UTF-8 everywhere. You should too. See [UTF-8 all the way through](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) for a list of checks. BTW, declaring to use UTF-8 won't magically convert your data, you need to actually use it. – Álvaro González Feb 04 '22 at 16:38
  • You're getting a JSON encoded in UTF-8. Nothing wrong here. – Olivier Feb 05 '22 at 09:11

2 Answers2

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I don't get what you are actually going to do with this. Assuming you are going to keep this in a database I am going to give you a solution.

You said these characters are changing into those weird symbols. What happening here is those imojis/symbols are converting into a UTF-8 encoded data form. And that is why you are seeing those symbols which are pure UTF-8 form.

Now if you want to keep those data you have to keep that data into some kind of text encode. It doesn't have to UTF-8 only . There are many encodings available.

If you want to decode those you have to write them in a system where it can be shown normally. Like I have kept imojis in my database as UTF-8 many years ago. The mobile phone I was using, gave me encoding for one emoji. I saved it and next time when I am seeing the data with my PC browser I am seeing some other symbols. The decoding system must be installed when you want to see them next time.

The point is you can not save the data as you can see in the Amazon.

Sohan Arafat
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This line

$awsv4->addHeader('content-type', 'application/json; charset=utf-8');

tells that the request you are sending is UTF-8 encoded and is JSON encoded data. It does not ask for a specific encoding for the response.

However the response you are getting is UTF-8 encoded

You read 🔥 ã€23800 mAh because you are displaying the received data using a encoding different from UTF-8.

A more detailed answer may be given if we see how you are writing the output and which is the context (web page, terminal...)

Paolo
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