Json encode with special char [duplicate] - php

I have some json I need to decode, alter and then encode without messing up any characters.
If I have a unicode character in a json string it will not decode. I'm not sure why since json.org says a string can contain: any-Unicode-character- except-"-or-\-or- control-character. But it doesn't work in python either.
{"Tag":"Odómetro"}
I can use utf8_encode which will allow the string to be decoded with json_decode, however the character gets mangled into something else. This is the result from a print_r of the result array. Two characters.
[Tag] => Odómetro
When I encode the array again I the character escaped to ascii, which is correct according to the json spec:
"Tag"=>"Od\u00f3metro"
Is there some way I can un-escape this? json_encode gives no such option, utf8_encode does not seem to work either.
Edit I see there is an unescaped_unicode option for json_encode. However it's not working as expected. Oh damn, it's only on php 5.4. I will have to use some regex as I only have 5.3.
$json = json_encode($array, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);
Warning: json_encode() expects parameter 2 to be long, string ...

I have found following way to fix this issue... I hope this can help you.
json_encode($data,JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE|JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES);

Judging from everything you've said, it seems like the original Odómetro string you're dealing with is encoded with ISO 8859-1, not UTF-8.
Here's why I think so:
json_encode produced parseable output after you ran the input string through utf8_encode, which converts from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8.
You did say that you got "mangled" output when using print_r after doing utf8_encode, but the mangled output you got is actually exactly what would happen by trying to parse UTF-8 text as ISO 8859-1 (ó is \x63\xb3 in UTF-8, but that sequence is ó in ISO 8859-1.
Your htmlentities hackaround solution worked. htmlentities needs to know what the encoding of the input string to work correctly. If you don't specify one, it assumes ISO 8859-1. (html_entity_decode, confusingly, defaults to UTF-8, so your method had the effect of converting from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8.)
You said you had the same problem in Python, which would seem to exclude PHP from being the issue.
PHP will use the \uXXXX escaping, but as you noted, this is valid JSON.
So, it seems like you need to configure your connection to Postgres so that it will give you UTF-8 strings. The PHP manual indicates you'd do this by appending options='--client_encoding=UTF8' to the connection string. There's also the possibility that the data currently stored in the database is in the wrong encoding. (You could simply use utf8_encode, but this will only support characters that are part of ISO 8859-1).
Finally, as another answer noted, you do need to make sure that you're declaring the proper charset, with an HTTP header or otherwise (of course, this particular issue might have just been an artifact of the environment where you did your print_r testing).

JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE was added in PHP 5.4 so it looks like you need upgrade your version of PHP to take advantage of it. 5.4 is not released yet though! :(
There is a 5.4 alpha release candidate on QA though if you want to play on your development machine.

A hacky way of doing JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE in PHP 5.3. Really disappointed by PHP json support. Maybe this will help someone else.
$array = some_json();
// Encode all string children in the array to html entities.
array_walk_recursive($array, function(&$item, $key) {
if(is_string($item)) {
$item = htmlentities($item);
}
});
$json = json_encode($array);
// Decode the html entities and end up with unicode again.
$json = html_entity_decode($rson);

$json = array('tag' => 'Odómetro'); // Original array
$json = json_encode($json); // {"Tag":"Od\u00f3metro"}
$json = json_decode($json); // Od\u00f3metro becomes Odómetro
echo $json->{'tag'}; // Odómetro
echo utf8_decode($json->{'tag'}); // Odómetro
You were close, just use utf8_decode.

try setting the utf-8 encoding in your page:
header('content-type:text/html;charset=utf-8');
this works for me:
$arr = array('tag' => 'Odómetro');
$encoded = json_encode($arr);
$decoded = json_decode($encoded);
echo $decoded->{'tag'};

Try Using:
utf8_decode() and utf8_encode

To encode an array that contains special characters, ISO 8859-1 to UTF8. (If utf8_encode & utf8_decode is not what is working for you, this might be an option)
Everything that is in ISO-8859-1 should be converted to UTF8:
$utf8 = utf8_encode('이 감사의 마음을 전합니다!'); //contains UTF8 & ISO 8859-1 characters;
$iso88591 = mb_convert_encoding($utf8, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');
$data = $iso88591;
Encode should work after this:
$encoded_data = json_encode($data);
Convert UTF-8 to & from ISO 8859-1

Related

Php json_encode converts utf8 string to characters codes

I have a Persian text "سرما"
And then when I convert it to JSON using json_encode(), I get a series of escaped character codes such as \u0633 which seems to be expected and of a rational process. But my confusion lies where I don't know how to convert them back into readable string of characters. How should I do that in PHP?
Should I use anything of mb_* family? I also have checked json_encode() parameters and have found nothing appropriate for me.
UPDATE
what I get saved in my DB is:
["u0633u0631u0645u0627"]
Which shows the characters are not escaped properly. While if I change it to
["\u0633\u0631\u0645\u0627"] it becomes easily readable by json_decode()
They should be converted back on the other end when it's decoded. This is the safest option as it might not be possible to guaranteed that the transmission or storage will not corrupt a multi-byte encoding.
If you're certain that everything is safe for UTF8 end-to-end you can do:
$res = json_encode($foo, \JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);
http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php
Maybe try encoding the unicode characters, and then json_encoding it, then on the other side (receiving JSON) decode the json, then decode the unicode.
Example:
//Encode
json_encode(utf8_encode($string));
//Decode
utf8_decode(json_decode($string));
its simple just use JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES atribute
your problem is't utf8 you need force JSON to don't escape Slashes
example
$bar = "سرما";
$res = json_encode($bar, JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES );
// $res equal to ["\u0633\u0631\u0645\u0627"]
if you check the result in your MYSQL Database
it happen when you did't Use addslashes()
example
$bar = "سرما";
$res = json_encode($bar, JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES );
$res = addslashes($res);
// $res equal to ["\\u0633\\u0631\\u0645\\u0627"] now it's ready to use in MYSQL

Converting to UTF-8 in PHP

I'm calling the Google Translate API and I need to send UTF-8 as input.
I have a piece of code to convert a string to UTF-8 but not matter what I try, when I check the encoding right after the conversion operation I get ASCII as the encoding of the string.
Here is the most popular answer I could find:
iconv(mb_detect_encoding($text, mb_detect_order(), true), "UTF-8", $text);
The other way I tried was like this:
$text = utf8_encode($text);
As soon as I check the encoding again (on both cases) I get ASCII as the result:
echo mb_detect_encoding($text);
What am I missing here?
Thanks for any tips.

write unicode characters into a file in php

I have a json array which is holding the correct string independent of language but when the json is encoded and wrriten into the file it doesnot have the correct values. Its has the the other value random english alphabets eg:(uuadb) I want to write a string into a file where the string could be in any language.Now i am testing with tamil language. But i found PHP doesn't support unicode. please help me how to write unicode charaters into the file using PHP.
I tried using pack function but how to use the pack function for any languages Or is there any other way of doing this.Please help me......
My guess is that you're seeing \uXXXX escapes instead of the non-ASCII characters you asked for. json_encode appears to always escape Unicode characters:
<?php
$arr = array("♫");
$json = json_encode($arr);
echo "$json\n";
# Prints ["\u266b"]
$str = '["♫"]';
$array = json_decode($str);
echo "{$array[0]}\n";
# Prints ♫
?>
If this is what you're getting, it's not wrong. You just have to ensure it's being decoded properly on the receiving end.
Another possibility is that the string you're passing is not in UTF-8. According to the documentation for json_encode and json_decode, these functions only work with UTF-8 data. Call mb_detect_encoding on your input string, and make sure it outputs either UTF-8 or ASCII.

Problem json_encode utf-8 [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Any way to return PHP `json_encode` with encode UTF-8 and not Unicode? [duplicate]
(5 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I have a problem with json_encode function with special characters.
For example I try this:
$string="Svrček";
echo "ENCODING=".mb_detect_encoding($string); //ENCODING=UTF-8
echo "JSON=".json_encode($string); //JSON="Svr\u010dek"
What can I do to display the string correctly, so JSON="Svrček"?
Thank you very much.
json_encode() is not actually outputting JSON* there. It’s outputting a javascript string. (It outputs JSON when you give it an object or an array to encode.) That’s fine, as a javascript string is what you want.
In javascript (and in JSON), č may be escaped as \u010d. The two are equivalent. So there’s nothing wrong with what json_encode() is doing. It should work fine. I’d be very surprised if this is actually causing you any form of problem. However, if the transfer is safely in a Unicode encoding (UTF-8, usually)†, there’s no need for it either. If you want to turn off the escaping, you can do so thus: json_encode('Svrček', JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE). Note that the flag JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE was introduced in PHP 5.4.0, and is unavailable in earlier versions.
By the way, contrary to what #onteria_ says, JSON does use UTF-8:
The character encoding of JSON text is always Unicode. UTF-8 is the only encoding that makes sense on the wire, but UTF-16 and UTF-32 are also permitted.
* Or, at least, it's not outputting JSON as defined in RFC 4627. However, there are other definitions of JSON, by which scalar values are allowed.
† JSON may be in UTF-8, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UFT-32LE, or UTF-32BE.
Ok, so, after you make database connection in your php script, put this line, and it should work, at least it solved my problem:
mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8');
Yes, json_encode escapes non-ascii characters. If you decode it you'll get your original result:
$string="こんにちは";
echo "ENCODING: " . mb_detect_encoding($string) . "\n";
$encoded = json_encode($string);
echo "ENCODED JSON: $encoded\n";
$decoded = json_decode($encoded);
echo "DECODED JSON: $decoded\n";
Output:
ENCODING: UTF-8
ENCODED JSON: "\u3053\u3093\u306b\u3061\u306f"
DECODED JSON: こんにちは
EDIT: It's worth nothing that:
JSON uses Unicode exclusively.
The self-documenting format that
describes structure and field names as
well as specific values;
Source: http://www.json.org/fatfree.html
It uses Unicode NOT UTF-8. This FAQ Explains the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8
You use JSON, your non-ascii characters get escaped into Unicode code points. For example こ = code point 3053.

replace eurosign in json

Can anyone help me with this one
I have this query and only after adding the last one wich is indexed against the euro
I get invalid json.
$url = 'http://www.google.com/finance/info?client=ig&q=goog,yhoo,AMS:TOM2';
$response= json_decode($response,true);
The only thing different if I directly echo the output is the questionmark in the json.
What would I use to replace the eurosign in the json return?, - and hopefully that will solve it.
thanks in adv, Richard
The JSON is valid ISO-8859-1, or Latin1. If your application is using some other encoding, say UTF-8, you need to convert the encoding of the response from Latin1 to UTF-8.
json_encode and json_decode expect in/output to be utf-8. PHP defaults to use iso-8859-1 as charset. So you may have to convert. (Note that the euro sign doesn't exist in iso-8859-1).

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