How to get json_encode() to work with ISO-8859-1 (åäö)

Question

json_encode() wont work for me when I'm using åäö. Why? And how can I get it to work?

The php:

echo json_encode($arr);

The javascript:

var theResponse = JSON.parse(xmlHttp.responseText);

When I alert() the response, and the response contains å, ä or ö, the response is = NULL

Please, help me out...

Solution 1

As Greg mentioned, I had to encode åäö to UTF-8. But I did't use iconv or mbstring. When I utf8_encode() all values before putting the values to the array the problem was solved.

Solution 2

It says in the json_encode() documentation:

This function only works with UTF-8 encoded data.

You should convert it to utf-8 with iconv or mbstring first.

Solution 3

This function will cast the correct data type for the JSON output and utf8_encode the strings.

    /* Change data-type from string to integar or float if required.
     * If string detected then utf8_encode() it. */
    function cast_data_types ($value) {
      if (is_array($value)) {
        $value = array_map('cast_data_types',$value);
        return $value;
      }
      if (is_numeric($value)) {
        if(strpos('.', $value)===false) return (float)$value;
        return (int) $value;
      }
      return utf8_encode((string)$value);
    }

json_encode (cast_data_types($data));

Solution 4

JSON defines strings as Unicode!

JSON Definition

You have to encode you ISO to UTF-8

Solution 5

Old question, but figured I'd put this here in case someone needs to log data using json_encode but keep the data untouched, intact for inspection later.

You can encode the data raw using base64_encode, then it will work with json_encode. Later after running json_decode, you can decode the string with base64_decode, you'll get the original data unmodified.

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