PHP and Unicode or UTF-8?

Question

My PHP application outputs JSON where special characters are encoded, f.ex. the string "Brøndum" is represented as "Br\øndum".

Can you tell me which encoding this is, as well as how I get back from "Br\øndum" to "Brøndum".

I have tried utf8_encode/decode but they don't work as expected.

Thanks!

Answer 1

That's standard JSON unicode escaping.

You get back to the actual character by using a JSON parser. json_decode in the case of PHP.

You can tell PHP not to escape Unicode characters in the first place with the JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE flag.

json_encode("Brøndum", JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE)

Answer 2

mb_detect_encoding is your function . You just pass it the string and it detects the codification. You can also send it an array with the possibilities (as a regular string like "hello" could potentially be encoded in different codifications.

echo mb_detect_encoding("Br\u00f8ndum");