Upside down quote “ json encoding returns null - PHP

Question

I have a prepared statement written on PHP that retrieves a string from MySQL, then i use json_encode to send the data to client, and it works perfect.

The problem happens when the string in MySQL contains “ .

Should i encode it differently? Or use some special flags?Or there are other solutions?

Thanks

It encodes fine for me when entered from the CLI (to \u201c). What version of PHP are you using? — abesto, Mar 18 '12 at 12:33
null returned from where? can you be more specific, maybe with some code? — dldnh, Mar 18 '12 at 12:37

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

Should i encode it differently?

I'd say yes. Obviously the string you receive from the database is not UTF-8 encoded. And that's the problem, because json_encode^Docs needs UTF-8 encoded strings. If they are invalid, it will return NULL - because there was no valid data to encode.

You can verify this by checking for the last error with the json_last_error^Docs function.

So when you query data from your database, tell the database server that you expect UTF-8 encoded data by setting the database client encoding. Consult the documentation of the database client library you're using, it's documented there.

See as well json_encode() non utf-8 strings? which shows how you can re-encode the strings itself if you don't want to change the database client connection.

Upside down quote “ json encoding returns null - PHP

1 Answers1