Question

I am working on a iphone app where I send user informations via SOAP to my server, where I store them in my database as UTF-8 strings.

The problem is, that when the server receives the strings they are sent as Unicode formatted in the form e.g. \U00fc which supposed to be a ‘ü’.
the string containing ‘\U00fc’ is stored correctly in the database. but when I read the database I get only ‘U00fc’ the \ is gone…

But also for better read option I would actually like to convert the ‘\U00fc’ into a ‘ü’ store it to the database and then when reading the database I would convert it back for the iPhone.

I just couldn’t find any functions in PHP that does this… I am pretty sure something like this must exist somewhere already, not that I have to re-implement the whole unicode table…

if you know any suggestions I would be glad if you could help me.

Answer 1

If your input insists on upper case \U, you could fix it with this:

<?php
header( "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8");

function fixEscapeSequence( $str ) {
    return preg_replace( '/\\\U([a-fA-F0-9]{4})/', '\u$1', $str );
}

echo json_decode(fixEscapeSequence('"M\U00FCller"'));
//Müller

Or all wrapped in one:

function uToUTF8( $str ) {
    $needle = array( "\\", '"');
    $repl = array( "\\\\", '\\"' );
    $str = str_replace( $needle, $repl, $str );
    return json_decode( preg_replace( '/\\\\\\\U([a-f0-9]{4})/i', '\u$1', "\"{$str}\"" ) );
}



echo uToUTF8( 'M\u00FCller');
//Müller
echo uToUTF8( 'M\U00FCller');
//Müller