PHP with DataTables gives an Invalid JSON response due to quotes - php

Question

I encountered a problem fetching my data from my database and display it via DataTables. I found out that most of my data has single and double quotes and other special characters. I tried every escaping functions in PHP but it didn't work. addslashes only retrieves 59 data out of 40,000 data. So far, i have this code:
PHP:
$query = mysqli_query($new_conn, "SELECT * FROM bill_of_materials");
$table = '';
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {
$table.= '{
"allotment_code":"'.$row['allotment_code'].'",
"activity":"'.$row['activity'].'",
"category_name":"'.addslashes($row['category_name']).'",
"description":"'.addslashes($row['description']).'"
},';
}
$table = substr($table,0, strlen($table) - 1);
echo '{"data":['.$table.']}';
**jQuery data tables:**
$(function() {
$('#dataTables-example').DataTable( {
"bLengthChange": false,
"pageLength": 50,
"bDeferRender": true,
"bProcessing": true,
"sPaginationType": "full_numbers",
"ajax": base_url('ajax/ajaxGetBOM.php'),
"columns":[
{mData: "allotment_code"},
{mData: "activity"},
{mData: "category_name"},
{mData: "description"}
],
contentType: 'application/json',
dataType: 'json'
});
})
function base_url(path) {
var url = 'https://192.168.3.254/'+path;
return url;
}
The error is like this:

Answer 1

Use json_encode() function to properly encode your response using JSON format.
$query = mysqli_query($new_conn, "SELECT * FROM bill_of_materials");
$data = array();
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {
$data[] = array(
"allotment_code" => $row["allotment_code"],
"activity" => $row["activity"],
"category_name" => $row["category_name"],
"description" => $row["description"]
);
}
header("Content-type: application/json");
echo json_encode(array("data" => $data));