Question

I have a json array which is holding the correct string independent of language but when the json is encoded and wrriten into the file it doesnot have the correct values. Its has the the other value random english alphabets eg:(uuadb) I want to write a string into a file where the string could be in any language.Now i am testing with tamil language. But i found PHP doesn’t support unicode. please help me how to write unicode charaters into the file using PHP.
I tried using pack function but how to use the pack function for any languages Or is there any other way of doing this.Please help me……

Answer 1

My guess is that you’re seeing \uXXXX escapes instead of the non-ASCII characters you asked for. json_encode appears to always escape Unicode characters:

<?php
$arr = array("♫");
$json = json_encode($arr);
echo "$json\n";
    # Prints ["\u266b"]

$str = '["♫"]';
$array = json_decode($str);
echo "{$array[0]}\n";
    # Prints ♫
?>

If this is what you’re getting, it’s not wrong. You just have to ensure it’s being decoded properly on the receiving end.

Another possibility is that the string you’re passing is not in UTF-8. According to the documentation for json_encode and json_decode, these functions only work with UTF-8 data. Call mb_detect_encoding on your input string, and make sure it outputs either UTF-8 or ASCII.