json with special characters like é - php

I'm developing a dependent select script using jQuery, PHP and JSON as the response.
Everything goes well except for using special characters like French ones (é , è , à...)
if I pre-encode them like (é , è , à) (Here I'm using spaces between the ampersand and the rest of the word to prevent auto encoding in my question) it works but when rendered with jquery the characters are not converted to what they should look like (é...), instead they are shown as is (é)
If I write them like (é) and don't pre-encode them the full value in this array entry is not shown.
What should I do here?
Thanks.

If I write them like (é) and don't pre-encode them the full value in
this array entry is not shown.
What should I do here?
In JSON you do not HTML-encode values. You send them literally (é) and set set Content-Type correctly:
header('Content-Type: application/json; Charset=UTF-8');
Declare the encoding your data is in, of course.

This worked for me, hopefully it will work for anyone else experiencing similar issues.
$title = 'é';
$title = mb_convert_encoding($title, "UTF-8", "HTML-ENTITIES");
header('Content-Type: application/json; Charset="UTF-8"');
echo json_encode(array('title' => $title));
The mb_convert_encoding function takes a value and converts it from (in this case) HTML-ENTITIES to UTF-8.
See here for me details on the function http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php

Just like the first anwser
Do you use a database? If Yes, make sure the database table is declared UFT8
How is declared the HTML page? UTF-8
IS the string in the PHP script file? If yes, make sure the file has a UTF-8 file format
You could also use utf8_encode (to send to HTML) and utf8_decode (to receive) but not the right way

Related

Mysql PHP, Retrived string contains apostrphone cant replace

I have some records on my table and as I can see it on PHPMyAdmin it contains apostrophe like this:
Brazil’s ‘car wash’
When I make a query and echo them on web page without any header these apostrophes appear as question marks like this:
Brazil�s �car wash�
but with this header:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");
they appear correctly.
Now the problem, I cannot replace them using this code:
$title = str_replace('’',"",$title);
$title = str_replace("‘","",$title);
How can I replace those apostrophes if str_replace not working?
This indicates your data is stored in ISO encoding, while the default encoding of your webpage might be UTF-8 or something else. Why replace them? You could convert your data to UTF-8 prior outputting or change the whole site encoding to ISO. But I would always prefer UTF-8.
You can convert to UTF-8 with $title = utf8_encode($title).

problems with german umlauts in php json_encode

I'm getting troubles with data from a database containing german umlauts. Basically, whenever I receive a data containing umlauts, it is a black square with an interrogation mark. I solved this by putting
mysql_query ('SET NAMES utf8')
before the query.
The problem is, as soon as I use json_encode(...) on a result of a query, the value containing an umlaut gets null. I can see this by calling the php-file directly in the browser. Are there other solution than replacing this characters before encoding to JSON and decoding it in JS?
Check out this pretty elegant solution mentioned here:
json_encode( $json_full, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE );
If the problem isn't anywhere else in your code this should fix it.
Edit: Umlaut problems can be caused by a variety of sources like the charset of your HTML document, the database format or some previous php functions your strings run through (You should definitely look into multibyte functions when having problems with umlauts).
These problems tend to be the pretty annoying because they are hard to track in most cases (altough this isn't as bad as it was a few years ago). The function above fixes – as asked – umlaut problems with json_encode … but there is a good chance that the problem is caused by a different part of your application and not this specific function.
I know this might be old but here a better solution:
Define the document type with utf-8 charset:
<?php header('Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8'); ?>
Make sure that all content is utf_encoded. JSON works only with utf-8!
function encode_items(&$item, $key)
{
$item = utf8_encode($item);
}
array_walk_recursive($rows, 'encode_items');
Hope this helps someone.
You probably just want to show the texts somehow in the browser, so one option would be to change the umlauts to HTML entities by using htmlentities().
The following test worked for me:
<?php
$test = array( 'bla' => 'äöü' );
$test['bla'] = htmlentities( $test['bla'] );
echo json_encode( $test );
?>
The only important point here is that json_encode() only supports UTF-8 encoding.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php
All string data must be UTF-8 encoded.
So when you have any special characters in a non utf-8 string json_encode will return a null Value.
So either you switch the whole project to utf-8 or you make sure you utf8_encode() any string before using json_encode().
make sure the translation file itself was explicitely stored as UTF-8
After that reload cache blocks and translations

Convert foreign characters with accents

I'm trying to compare some text to the text in a database. In the database any text with an accent is encoded like in HTML (i.e. é) when I compare the database text to my string it doesn't match because my string just shows é. When I use the PHP function htmlentities to encode the string first the é turns into é weird? Using htmlspecialchars doesn't encode the é at all.
How would you suggest I compare é to é as well as all the other accented characters?
You need to send in the correct charset to htmlentities. It looks like you're using UTF-8, but the default is ISO-8859-1. Change it like this:
$encoded = htmlentities($text, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
Another solution is to convert the text to ISO-8859-1 before encoding, but that may destroy information (ISO-8859-1 does not contain nearly as many characters as UTF-8). If you want to try that instead, do like this:
$encoded = htmlentities(utf8_decode($text));
I'm working on french site, and I also had same problem. This is the function that I use.
function convert_accent($string)
{
return htmlspecialchars_decode(htmlentities(utf8_decode($string)));
}
What it does it decodes your string to utf8, than converts everything HTML entities. even tags. But we want to convert tags back to normal, than htmlspecialchars_decode will convert them back. So in the end you will get a string with converted accents without touching tags.
You can use pass through this function your email content before sending it to recipent.
Another issue you might face is that, sometimes with this function the content from database converts to ? . In this case you should do this before running your query:
mysql_query("SET NAMES `utf8`");
But you might need to do it, it depends on encoding in your table. I hope it helps.
The comparing task is related to the charset and the collation you selected when you create the database or the tables. If you are saving strings with a lot of accents like spanish I sugget you to use charset uft8 and the collation could be the more accurate to the language(english, french or whatever) you're using.
The best thing of using the correct charset in the database is that you can save the string in natural way e.g: my name I can store it as is "Mario Juárez" and I have no need of doing some weird conversions.
Ran into similar issues recently. Followed Emil's answer and it worked fine locally but not on our dev/stage environments. I ended up using this and it worked all around:
$title = html_entity_decode(utf8_decode($item));
Thanks for leading me in the right direction!

Special characters escaping with JS and PHP

my application geting Text from a input field an post it over ajax to a php file for saving it to db.
var title = encodeURIComponent($('#title').val());
if I escape() the title it is all OK but i have Problems with "+" character. So i use the encodeURIComponent().
Now i habe a Problem with german special characters like "ö" "ä" "ü" they will be displayed like a crypdet something....
Have some an idea how can i solve this problem?
Thx
I suppose this has to do with encoding : your HTML page might be using UTF-8, and the special characters are encoded like this :
>>> encodeURIComponent('ö');
"%C3%B6"
When your PHP page receives this, it has to know it's UTF-8, and deal with it as UTF-8 -- which means that everything on the server-side has to work with UTF-8 :
PHP code must use functions that can work with multi-byte characters
The database (db, tables, columns, ...) must use UTF-8 for storing data
When generating HTML pages, you need to indicate it's UTF-8 too, ...
For instance, if you are using var_dump() on the PHP side to display what's been sent from the client, don't forget to indicate that the generated page is in UTF-8, with something like this :
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
Else, the browser will use it's default charset -- which is not necessarily the right one, and possibly display garbage.
You might use escape("AbcÄüö") and you would get "Abc%C4%FC%F6"
In php you could then use urldecode($myValue) to get "AbcÄüö" again

Get source code with Chinese characters PHP

Well, I give up.
I've been messing around with all I could think of to retrieve data from a target website that has information in traditional Chinese encoding (charset=GB2312).
I've been using the simple_html_parser like always but it doesn't seem to return the Chinese characters, in fact all I get are some weird question marks embedded inside a rhomboid shape.
("�������ѯ�ؼ��֣�" Like so)
Declaring the encoding for the php file didn't do anything except of getting rid of some unwanted character showing at the start of the page.
By declaring it I mean:
header('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=GB2312');
I can't get any data that's written in Chinese, also tried file_get_contents with the same luck. I'm probably missing something obvious since I can't find any related discussion elsewhere.
Thanks in advance.
Have you tried converting the encoding with mb_convert_encoding or iconv, e.g.
$str = mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', 'GB2312');
or
$str = iconv("UTF-8", "GB2312//IGNORE", $content);
Get it in whatever character set the source uses, then convert it to something usable locally, such as UTF-8. Then send it to the browser.
set header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
It's working for me

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