PHP Cron Job json_encode error - php

Question

I have a PHP file that's running a simple check for currency conversion. It works perfectly when I run it through my browser but my goal is to build a cron. When I run the script via SSH:
php /path/to/file.php
I get the following:
PHP Warning: json_encode(): Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument in /path/to/file.php on line 36
Where line 36 is:
fwrite($fh, json_encode($conversions));
...where $conversions is a simple single-dimension array
Here's the file:
$conversions = array();
$currencies = json_decode(file_get_contents("/path/to/currencies.json"), true);
foreach($currencies as $cur=>$data){
//make string to be put in API
$string = "1USD=?".$data['code'];
//Call Google API
$google_url = "http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=".$string;
$ch = curl_init();
// set URL and other appropriate options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $google_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// grab URL and pass it to the browser
$result = curl_exec($ch);
//Explode result to convert into an array
$result = explode('"', $result);
$converted_amount = explode(' ', $result[3]);
$conversion = $converted_amount[0];
//$conversion = $conversion * $amount;
$conversions[$cur] = $conversion;
if($conversion==0){ exit('0 Return Error'); }
curl_close($ch);
}
$fh = fopen("/path/to/currency_conversions.json", 'w') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, json_encode($conversions));
fclose($fh);

Answer 1

Well, I searched for you and I found the json_encode acceptes only UTF-8
so here is the solution:
for($i=0;$i<count($conversions);$i++)
$conversions[$i] = utf8_encode($conversions[$i]);
fwrite($fh, json_encode($conversions));

Answer 2

Try updating your PHP version to a version later than version 5.2.7
Older version have UTF-8 bugs.