JS cannot parse JSON with unicode character

Question

I have the following JSON string {"name":""C\u008cUR Carmen"} but \u008c is not parsed. It shows empty character instead.

json = '{"name":"C\u008cUR Carmen"}';
json = JSON && JSON.parse(json) || $.parseJSON(json);

Show : CUR Carmen

Expect : CŒUR Carmen

Please help.

* Note * : The JSON data is returned by the PHP server so there shouldn't be any syntax error because I used json_encode and get the response from AJAX. It works with other characters such as à, é but only this wierd character doesn't display properly

EDIT : Solved! It's not a JS problem it's a charset problem returned by MySQL. You can use mysql_set_charset('utf8') before returning SQL data. Show \u0152 as expected

Answer 1

There's no need to escape an unicode character stated in RFC 4627

2.5. Strings

The representation of strings is similar to conventions used in the C family of programming languages. A string begins and ends with quotation marks. All Unicode characters may be placed within the quotation marks except for the characters that must be escaped: quotation mark, reverse solidus, and the control characters (U+0000 through U+001F).

You can use your unicode string directly:

json = '{"name":"CŒUR Carmen"}';
json = JSON && JSON.parse(json) || $.parseJSON(json);

I think there's a transcoding bug in your server side implementation where you change the output to ASCII before using json_encode. It is a requirement of JSON that all data is encoded in Unicode.

Edit

In this fiddle there's an example how to revert the escaped unicode in javascript.