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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T05:52:52+00:00

I’m calling json_encode() on data that comes from a MySQL database with utf8_general_ci collation.

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I’m calling json_encode() on data that comes from a MySQL database with utf8_general_ci collation. The problem is that some rows have weird data which I can’t clean. For example symbol �, so once it reaches json_encode(), it fails with json_encode(): Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument.

I’ve tried utf8_encode() and utf8_decode(), even with mb_check_encoding() but it keeps getting through and causing havoc.

Running PHP 5.3.10 on Mac. So the question is – how can I clean up invalid utf8 symbols, keeping the rest of data, so that json_encoding() would work?

Update. Here is a way to reproduce it:

echo json_encode(pack("H*" ,'c32e'));
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Seems like the symbol was Å, but since data consists of surnames that shouldn’t be public, only first letter was shown and it was done by just $lastname[0], which is wrong for multibyte strings and caused the whole hassle. Changed it to mb_substr($lastname, 0, 1) – works like a charm.

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