Question

I use JSON to encode an array, and I get a string like this:

{"name":"\u00fe\u00fd\u00f0\u00f6\u00e7"}

Now I need to convert this to ISO-8859-9. I tried the following but it fails:

header('Content-type: application/json; charset=ISO-8859-9');
$json = json_encode($response);
$json = utf8_decode($json);
$json = mb_convert_encoding($json, "ISO-8859-9", "auto");
echo $json;

It doesnt seem to work. What am I missing?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

You can do:

$json = json_encode($response);
header('Content-type: application/json; charset=ISO-8859-9');
echo mb_convert_encoding($json, "ISO-8859-9", "UTF-8");

Assuming that strings in $response is in utf-8. But I would strongly suggest that you just use utf-8 all the way through.

Edit: Sorry, just realised that won’t work, since json_encode escapes unicode points as javascript escape codes. You’ll have to convert these to utf-8 sequences first. I don’t think there are any built-in functionality for that, but you can use a slightly modified variation of this library to get there. Try the following:

function unicode_hex_to_utf8($hexcode) {
  $arr = array(hexdec(substr($hexcode[1], 0, 2)), hexdec(substr($hexcode[1], 2, 2)));
  $dest = '';
  foreach ($arr as $src) {
    if ($src < 0) {
      return false;
    } elseif ( $src <= 0x007f) {
      $dest .= chr($src);
    } elseif ($src <= 0x07ff) {
      $dest .= chr(0xc0 | ($src >> 6));
      $dest .= chr(0x80 | ($src & 0x003f));
    } elseif ($src == 0xFEFF) {
      // nop -- zap the BOM
    } elseif ($src >= 0xD800 && $src <= 0xDFFF) {
      // found a surrogate
      return false;
    } elseif ($src <= 0xffff) {
      $dest .= chr(0xe0 | ($src >> 12));
      $dest .= chr(0x80 | (($src >> 6) & 0x003f));
      $dest .= chr(0x80 | ($src & 0x003f));
    } elseif ($src <= 0x10ffff) {
      $dest .= chr(0xf0 | ($src >> 18));
      $dest .= chr(0x80 | (($src >> 12) & 0x3f));
      $dest .= chr(0x80 | (($src >> 6) & 0x3f));
      $dest .= chr(0x80 | ($src & 0x3f));
    } else {
      // out of range
      return false;
    }
  }
  return $dest;
}

print mb_convert_encoding(
  preg_replace_callback(
    "~\\\\u([1234567890abcdef]{4})~", 'unicode_hex_to_utf8',
    json_encode($response)),
  "ISO-8859-9", "UTF-8");