Question

I am using a PHP 5.2.17 server + MySQL 5.1.65.

I have a table containing a field that is VARCHAR utf8_general_ci and I fetch a record from this table.

This is how I open the connection, nothing special:

$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'user', 'pass');

I need to respond with a JSON object that contain special characters Unicode escaped, I mean the \u00e1 notation.

 $result = mysql_query(sprintf("select * from data t where t.domain='%s'", escape($domain));


  while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $r[] = array(
      "tagid" => $row['DATAID'],
      "name" => $row['NAME']
    );
   )

$encoded = json_encode($r);
header('Content-type: application/json');
exit($encoded);

My problem is fields containing special characters (áé..) are returned as null in the JSON response.

After having Googled for a while I see that PHP 5.2 lack the json_encode parameters, so I need to unicode-escape name fields manually. But how could I do this?

Answer 1

json_encode() should be able to handle UTF-8 data perfectly well – JSON is UTF-8 only, so it would be strange for PHP to not have this particular function as UTF-8 aware.

$array = array('key' => 'せ');

var_dump(json_encode($array)); // string(16) "{"key":"\u305b"}"

Your column collation might be VARCHAR utf8_general_ci but that does not mean the characters are encoded as UTF-8. Your table should be created with:

CREATE TABLE ... CHARACTER SET utf8

And you should probably execute this as your first query:

SET NAMES utf8