Characters with jquery json

Question

I'm using jquery $.getJSON to retrieve list of cities.

Everything works fine, but I'm from Estonia and we are using some characters like õ, ü. ä, ö.

When I pass letters like this to callback function, I keep getting empty strings. I've tried to base64 encode(server-side)-decode(jquery base64 plugin) strings (i thought it was a good idea as long as I can compress pages with php, so I don't have to worry about bandwidth), but in this way I end up with some random chinese symbols.

What would be the best workaround for this problem.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You need to utf8_encode() your output data. There's no need to set your encoding on the client side to UTF-8 as it's already default.

<?php
    if( isset( $_GET['json'] ) ) {

        die( json_encode( array( 'text' => utf8_encode( 'õ, ü. ä, ö' ) ) ) );
    }

    include_jquery(); # this outputs jquery include
>?

<script>

    $.getJSON( 'this_file.php', { 'json': 1 }, function( data ) {
        console.log( 'data', data );
    });

</script>

Answer 2

You have to make sure you keep a consistent character encoding. The Estonian chars you want are in utf-8 so you have to use $.ajax and set the char encoding explicitly (via contentType).

You can take the resulting ajax and process it.

You could also use ajaxSetup before calling getJSON to set the content type.

http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajaxSetup/

This would allow you to use getJSON

Also, here is a relevant SO post about the same subject: How to set encoding in .getJSON JQuery