Question

I am trying to save some data on the server but finding some encoding problems.

This is how I am sending my objects to PHP (which works fine but I don’t think the contentType is actually doing anything):

$.post(
  'myfile.php',
   {
       contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=utf-8",
       data : myData
   },
   function (data, textStatus, jqXHR){
      //some code here
   }
);

and then in PHP (myfile.php):

<?php
   header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

   $file = 'data/theData.txt'; //the file to edit
   $current = file_get_contents($file); // Open the file to get existing content
   $a2 = json_decode( $current, true );

   $data = $_POST['data']; //the data from the webpage

   $res = array_merge_recursive( $data, $a2 );

   $resJson = json_encode( $res );

   // Write the contents back to the file
   file_put_contents($file, $resJson);
?>

As you can see I am getting the original contents of the file and decoding the json. I am then merging the result with the data sent from the webpage before re-encoding in json and put the contents back.

This all works as expected. However, at one point in my Jquery the data sent contains a wide variety of symbols like “/ ö é ł Ż ę”

When the file is saved each ‘/’ has an escape character ‘\’ in front of it and likewise the ‘é’ for example is ‘\u00e9’

How do I override this? Should I try to convert it properly in the PHP or is their a way in the JQuery to convert back to the correct format after I have $.get(‘data/theData.txt’?

Any light shed on this issue is greatly appreciated! Please excuse the poor variable names.

Answer 1

The link provided by @chalet16 helped but if JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE doesn’t work for you this does the job!

$myString = $json_encode($myObject); 
//After initially encoding to json there are escapes on all '/' and characters like ö é ł Ż ę

//First unescape slashes:
$myString = str_replace("\/","/",$myString);

//Then escape double quotes
$myString = str_replace('"','\\"',$myString);

//And Finally:
$myNewString = json_decode('"'.$myString.'"');