php json_encode euro symbol for android

Question

I am loading data in an android app from a php service. In php i use json_encode to convert my data. Now i have a string with a € character in it. json_encode converts this to \€ , but as far as i know the actual correct unicode should be \€ . Usually thats not a problem but the Droid Sans Font does only render \€ as the euro symbol.

My question: Is there a way to make the € character convert correctly (i dont care if thats in Java or in PHP , although i would prefer a php solution) without using any string replaces or regex etc.. replacing seems ugly and there might be more symbols that dont get converted properly that i dont know of yet.

Answer 1

\€ means that the input character was \\x80 which is the Euro sign in Windows-1252 . So I assume your string is encoded in this charset, then you should convert it to UTF-8 because json_encode only works with UTF-8 input:

$string = iconv('Windows-1252', 'UTF-8', $string);