How to get json_encode() to work with ISO-8859-1 (åäö)

Question

json_encode() wont work for me when I'm using åäö. Why? And how can I get it to work?

The php:

echo json_encode($arr);

The javascript:

var theResponse = JSON.parse(xmlHttp.responseText);

When I alert() the response, and the response contains å, ä or ö, the response is = NULL

Please, help me out...

Answer 1

Old question, but figured I'd put this here in case someone needs to log data using json_encode but keep the data untouched, intact for inspection later.

You can encode the data raw using base64_encode, then it will work with json_encode. Later after running json_decode, you can decode the string with base64_decode, you'll get the original data unmodified.

Answer 2

As of PHP 5.4.0:

Convert your strings in your array to into utf-8 using utf8_encode($str) function.

Then json_encode with JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE option:

$arr = json_encode($array, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);