PHP: fetch_assoc() into array causing null values [duplicate] - php

Question

This question already has answers here:
UTF-8 all the way through
(13 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I'm trying to fetch data from a MariaDB database of festivals and respective locations. When running:
while($row = $sth->fetch_assoc()){}
and iterating over $row while outputting the values, I get data as it is in the database.
However, when storing each row like so:
while($row = $sth->fetch_assoc()){
$results[] = $row;
}
And echoing the results as JSON (echo json_encode($results);)
I get this:
{"id":"0","name":null,"village":"0","startDate":"2019-01-16",
"endDate":"2019-01-23","message":null}
This is for an existing Linux server, which I do not manage (I'm using CPanel). PHP version is 5.4 and MariaDB 10.1.37.
So far, a lot of code samples on Stack Overflow and other websites are using
$results[] = $row;
for storing the results.
I'm returning to PHP after 3 years of Swift only programming... So I suspect this could be a simple issue to solve...
Thanks!

Answer 1

May be I'm bit too late for answering this question, but it may help someone stuck with this issue. Recently I faced a similar issue and it took me 3 days to understand that it is an issue with the utf-8 characters. Data stored in database are perfectly fine. But when it comes to return it via json_encode(), it shows no data at all as json_encode only supports utf-8 data(reference).
For your case the following method should work-
foreach ($results as &$r) {
$r['name'] = utf8_encode($r['name']);
//same for all other items
}