UTF-8 character encoding battles json_encode()

Question

Quest

I am looking to fetch rows that have accented characters. The encoding for the column (NAME) is latin1_swedish_ci.

The Code

The following query returns Abord â Plouffe using phpMyAdmin:

SELECT C.NAME FROM CITY C
WHERE C.REGION_ID=10 AND C.NAME_LOWERCASE LIKE '%abor%'
ORDER BY C.NAME LIMIT 30

The following displays expected values (function is called db_fetch_all( $result )):

  while( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc( $result ) ) {
    foreach( $row as $value ) {
      echo $value . " ";
      $value = utf8_encode( $value );
      echo $value . " ";
    }

    $r[] = $row;
  }

The displayed values: 5482 5482 Abord â Plouffe Abord â Plouffe

The array is then encoded using json_encode:

$rows = db_fetch_all( $result );
echo json_encode( $rows );

Problem

The web browser receives the following value:

{"ID":"5482","NAME":null}

Instead of:

{"ID":"5482","NAME":"Abord â Plouffe"}

(Or the encoded equivalent.)

Question

The documentation states that json_encode() works on UTF-8. I can see the values being encoded from LATIN1 to UTF-8. After the call to json_encode(), however, the value becomes null.

How do I make json_encode() encode the UTF-8 values properly?

One possible solution is to use the Zend Framework, but I'd rather not if it can be avoided.

Answer 1

while( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc( $result ) ) {
  $r[] = array_map( utf8_encode, $row );
}

...

echo json_encode( $rows );

Answer 2

foreach( $row as $value ) {
  $value = utf8_encode( $value );

You're not actually writing your encoded value back into the $row array there, you're only changing the local variable $value. If you want to write back when you change the variable, you would need to treat it as a reference:

foreach( $row as &$value ) {

Personally I would try to avoid references where possible, and for this case instead use array_map as posted by Kemo.

Or mysql_set_charset to UTF-8 to get the return values in UTF-8 regardless of the actual table collations, as a first step towards migrating the app to UTF-8.