Question

Quest

I am looking to fetch rows that have accented characters. The encoding for the column (NAME) is latin1_swedish_ci.

The Code

The following query returns Abord â Plouffe using phpMyAdmin:

SELECT C.NAME FROM CITY C
WHERE C.REGION_ID=10 AND C.NAME_LOWERCASE LIKE '%abor%'
ORDER BY C.NAME LIMIT 30

The following displays expected values (function is called db_fetch_all( $result )):

  while( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc( $result ) ) {
    foreach( $row as $value ) {
      echo $value . " ";
      $value = utf8_encode( $value );
      echo $value . " ";
    }

    $r[] = $row;
  }

The displayed values: 5482 5482 Abord â Plouffe Abord â Plouffe

The array is then encoded using json_encode:

$rows = db_fetch_all( $result );
echo json_encode( $rows );

Problem

The web browser receives the following value:

{"ID":"5482","NAME":null}

Instead of:

{"ID":"5482","NAME":"Abord â Plouffe"}

(Or the encoded equivalent.)

Question

The documentation states that json_encode() works on UTF-8. I can see the values being encoded from LATIN1 to UTF-8. After the call to json_encode(), however, the value becomes null.

How do I make json_encode() encode the UTF-8 values properly?

One possible solution is to use the Zend Framework, but I’d rather not if it can be avoided.

Answer 1

// Create an empty array for the encoded resultset
$rows = array();

// Loop over the db resultset and put encoded values into $rows
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  $rows[] = array_map('utf8_encode', $row);
}

// Output $rows
echo json_encode($rows);