How to Handle UTF-8 Characters When Encoding a PHP Array to JSON?

JSON Encoding Battles with UTF-8 Characters in PHP

In the realm of database handling in PHP, one may encounter challenges when working with accented characters and UTF-8 encoding. Consider the scenario where you wish to retrieve rows from a table that contains accented characters, and the column encoding is configured as latin1_swedish_ci.

Understanding the Problem

Attempts to display the fetched rows using utf8_encode() initially seem to work, but subsequent JSON encoding using json_encode() results in null values for the affected fields. This arises because json_encode() may not handle UTF-8 characters encoded using mysql_fetch_assoc().

A Solution to Preserve UTF-8

To resolve this issue, employ the following approach:

1. Create an empty array named $rows to store the encoded results.
2. Iterate over the database result set using while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)).
3. For each row, apply utf8_encode() to every element using $rows[] = array_map('utf8_encode', $row). This step properly converts accented characters to UTF-8.
4. Finally, encode the $rows array to JSON using echo json_encode($rows).

By implementing this method, the JSON encoding will properly represent the UTF-8 characters, preserving the accented characters and preventing null values for the affected fields.

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