Question

I am playing with an api that just reads from my database and returns the data in json format.

In phpMyAdmin the sentences are perfect (I used utf8_general to input a csv). Example:

    A line that uses 'r and special chars etc

But when I echo the json, I get this:

    A line that uses ///\\/\/\/r and special chars etc

First I got null object back so I used:

   mysql_set_charset('utf8', $link);

But I still get the corrupted data back.

Update:

Some more info:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link);

/* grab the posts from the db */
$query = "SELECT * FROM huren WHERE 1";

$result = mysql_query($query,$link) or die('Errant query:  '.$query);

// check row count 
$amount = mysql_num_rows($result);

/* create one master array of the records */
$houses = array();
if(mysql_num_rows($result)) {
    while($post = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
        $houses[] = $post;
    }
}

/* output in necessary format */

    header('Content-type: application/json');
 $changed_json= str_replace('\\/', '/',json_encode(array('House'=>$houses)));
echo str_replace('\\\\', '\\',$changed_json);

Answer 1

What’s with the replacing operations? json_encode either returns fully valid JSON representing the exact input you gave it, or it returns NULL because there were issues like your data not being in UTF-8. You should not do anything to the string returned by json_encode! If you didn’t get NULL, then you have won and just need to echo it.

It will just work with this:

header('Content-type: application/json');
echo json_encode(array('House'=>$houses));

The charset doesn’t really matter, since by default, json_encode produces pure ASCII output. This is because by default, unicode characters are represented in unicode escape sequences, e.g. \uxxxx