PHPUnit and curl wrong charset, cannot compare equal strings - php

Question

i have a PHPUnit test with an assertion:
$this->assertEquals(json_encode($expected), json_encode($result));
The assertion fails because the strings differ in their encoding: (the diff is actually larger, from a large json object)
Failed asserting that two strings are equal.
--- Expected
+++ Actual
## ##
-'Wir holen Ihre P\u00e4ckchen im Wunschzeitraum ab.'
+'Wir holen Ihre P\u00c3\u00a4ckchen im Wunschzeitraum ab.'
I get the actual string from a curl request, the expected string is defined inside the php file as a string.
I use the following curl code to retrieve the JSON from a server:
$headers = array(
"GET /HTTP/1.1",
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1",
"Content-type: application/json;charset=\"utf-8\"",
"Accept: application/json",
"Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5",
"Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate",
"Accept-Charset: utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7",
"Keep-Alive: 300",
"Connection: keep-alive");
$ch = curl_init('http://localhost/frontend_test.php/api');
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
CURLOPT_POST => TRUE,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $headers,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode($some_data),
CURLOPT_HEADER => 1
));
// Send the request
$response = curl_exec($ch);
list($header, $body) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $response, 2);
$result = json_decode($body);
What may be the cause of this?

Answer 1

okay so the solution is simple in my case: The PDO connection used the wrong charset. (The API retrieved the String in question from the database, which was not encoded properly) Dumb mistake