How to parse unicode format (e.g. \u201c, \u2014) using PHP

Question

I am pulling data from the Facebook graph which has characters encoded like so: \u2014 and \u2014

Is there a function to convert those characters into HTML? i.e \u2014 -> —

If you have some further reading on these character codes), or suggested reading about unicode in general I would appreciate it. This is so confusing to me. I don't know what to call these codes... I guess unicode, but unicode seems to mean a whole lot of things.

Answer 1

Take a look at a previous answer to this exact question

Answer 2

Facebook Graph API returns JSON objects. Use json_decode() to read them into PHP and you do not have to worry about handling string literal escapes like \uNNNN. Don't try to decode JSON/JavaScript string literals by yourself, or extract chosen properties using regex.

Having read the string value, you'll have a UTF-8-encoded string. If your target HTML is also UTF-8-encoded, you don't need to replace — (U+2014) with any entity reference. Just use htmlspecialchars() on the string when outputting it, so that any < or & characters in the string are properly encoded.

If you do for some reason need to produce ASCII-safe HTML, use htmlentities() with the charset arg set to 'utf-8'.