PHP UTF-8 encoding echoes question marks

Question

I'm trying to echo a json_response with unicode characters using the following code:

function utf8ize($d) {
if (is_array($d)) {
    foreach ($d as $k => $v) {
        $d[$k] = utf8ize($v);
    }
} else if (is_string ($d)) {
    return utf8_encode($d);
}
return $d;
}

used like this:

echo json_encode(utf8ize($response));

The problem with this is that some characters are encoded properly and other characters like ć and ś are sent as question marks as seen in the below image:

I'm not sure how to fix this.

they are taken from my database which is in `utf8_polish_ci` — Alk, Sep 03 '16 at 23:23
Then what do you expect `utf8_encode` to do? If they are already in UTF-8 a `utf8_encode` will just destroy them. [Docs](http://php.net/utf8_encode) — tkausl, Sep 03 '16 at 23:24
I added that because without it my php script didn't want to echo anything and I followed the suggestion here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19361282/why-would-json-encode-returns-an-empty-string after which it started returning the output shown — Alk, Sep 03 '16 at 23:25
I'd recommend you to follow fayd's answer (the one with 8 upvotes) instead. — tkausl, Sep 03 '16 at 23:27

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 03 '16 at 23:28

2

According to http://php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php utf8_encode encodes data from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

However, Polish lang has iso-8859-2 charset so you should use

iconv('iso-8859-2', 'utf-8', $d) instead of utf8_encode($d)

answered Sep 03 '16 at 23:28

Andrej

7,474
1
19
21

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 03 '16 at 23:27

1

You could try to execute

SET NAMES utf8

As a query. After you've made the connection.

Then just in case set this header

header('Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');

Then try again

answered Sep 03 '16 at 23:27

Robin Knaapen

606
4
12

`SET NAMES utf8` changed the output to this : `"Warto\u0139\u009b\u00c4\u0087 wyra\u0139\u017aenia 5 - 2 \u00c2\u02c7 4 jest r\u0102\u0142wna` That's still not displaying properly for me – Alk Sep 03 '16 at 23:36
Nevermind, after I deleted the utf8_encode it works fine. Thanks – Alk Sep 03 '16 at 23:37
Not sure if you have any html, but the use the header like `header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');` in that case – Robin Knaapen Sep 03 '16 at 23:43
Nope, this is a PHP script called by a mobile app in Java, no HTML going on – Alk Sep 03 '16 at 23:46
1

Okay, but wanted to be sure. Haha – Robin Knaapen Sep 03 '16 at 23:46

PHP UTF-8 encoding echoes question marks

2 Answers2