Using single 'smart quote' in my JSON data is breaking PHP script

Question

Hi folks, I've got a PHP script that is reading in some JSON data provided by a client. The JSON data provided had a single 'smart quote' in it.

Example:

{
    "title"         : "Lorem Ipsum’s Dolar" 
}

In my script I'm using a small function to get the json data:

public function getJson($url) {
    $filePath = $url;
    $fh = fopen($filePath, 'r') or die();
    $temp = fread($fh, filesize($filePath));
    $temp = utf8_encode($temp);
    echo $temp . "<br />";
    $json = json_decode($temp);
    fclose($fh);
    return $json;
}

If I utf8 encode the data, when I echo it out I see nothing where the quote should be. If I don't utf8 encode the data, when I echo it out I see the funny question mark symbol �

Any thoughts on how to actually see the proper character??

Thanks!

Answer 1

The issue is more on the side, that generates the JSON file. There you should escape the ' by \'

If you can't modify this part, you should do it like this with addslashes:

$temp = fread($fh, filesize($filePath));
$temp = utf8_encode($temp);
echo $temp . "<br />";
$temp = addslashes($temp);
$json = json_decode($temp);

Answer 2

Can you possibly do a string replace assuming the data is all utf8?

$text = str_replace($find, $replace, $text);

Looking for the characters below?

 '“'  // left side double smart quote
 'â€'  // right side double smart quote
 '‘'  // left side single smart quote
 '’'  // right side single smart quote
 '…'  // elipsis
 '—'  // em dash
 '–'  // en dash

Answer 3

Is it possibe that the server is sending the json data in an encoding like windows-1252? That codepage has some smart code characters where iso-8859 has control characters. Could you try to use iconv("windows-1252", "utf-8", $temp) instead of utf8_encode. Even better would be if the server already sends utf-8 encoded json, since that is the recommended encoding per rfc4627.