Question

I have a quite complex, even though not really big, array, with many levels of nesting.
The array contains values that are encoded in ISO-8895, and also objects, with the same issue.
If I just

 json_encode($array)

PHP wil silently encode all the values contining ISO-8895 characters as null.

Looking at the PHP documentation, I managed to write a working solution:

function fixMultibyteSerializedObject($match)
{
    return 's:' . mb_strlen($match[2]);
}
/**
 * Useful to json-encode arrays of objects with ISO-8895 encoded values.
 * Does not work with iso-encoded keys
 * @param var $object array or object to be encoded
 * @param int $options json_encode options
 */
function isoJsonEncode($object, $options = null)
{
    $str = serialize($object);
    $str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'utf-8');
    $str = preg_replace_callback(
            '!(?<=^|;)s:(\d+)(?=:"(.*?)";(?:}|a:|s:|b:|d:|i:|o:|N;))!s',
             'fixMultibyteSerializedObject',
            $str);
    $object = unserialize($str);
    return json_encode($object, $options);
}

Apart from getting a better library, such as the Zend json encoding component, can you suggest a better solution?

Thank you,
Iacopo

Answer 1

What about something like this?

array_walk_recursive($array, function (&$elem) {
    if (is_string($elem)) {
        $elem = iconv('ISO-8895', 'UTF-8', $elem);
    }
});

echo json_encode($array);