Json_decode with special chars

Question

I got a big problem posting data via jQuery Ajax as JSON to my Server. JSLint say the data is OK and the Content-Type of the request is set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8. Server runs on PHP 5.2.11 so I can't use json_last_error().

I tried url_decode, utf8_decode and html_entities_decode, but nothing seems to work.

var_dump(json_decode($jdata)); returns null, but if I do a var_dump($jdata) everything looks OK. $jdata is the post data:$jdata = $this->input->post('requestdata');.

Here some example post data grab from Firebug:

{
    "projectnumber": "345",
    "projecdescription": "345",
    "articles": [
        {
            "position": 1,
            "article_id": 677,
            "online_text": "3 Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: DE - Sprache: de"
        },
        {
            "position": 2,
            "article_id": 678,
            "online_text": "2 Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: ### - Sprache: en"
        }
    ]
}

Edit:

I tried this now:

$string = $this->input->post('requestdata');
var_dump($string);
$json = preg_replace('/,\s*([\]}])/m', '$1', utf8_encode($string));
$json = json_decode($json);
var_dump($json);

The result is:

string(338) "{"projectnumber": "4444", "projecdescription": "4444", "articles": [{"position":1, "article_id": 676, "online_text": "### Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: DE - Sprache: de"}, {"position":2, "article_id": 681, "online_text": "### Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: ### - Sprache: en"}]}" NULL

By pasting the JSON string direct into the PHP source it works, but getting it from post not!

Answer 1

You are having error because of new line in your string

$string = '{"projectnumber" : "4444","projecdescription" : "4444", "articles" : [{"position":1, "article_id" : 676, "online_text" : "### Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: DE 
 - Sprache: de"},{"position":2, "article_id" : 681, "online_text" : "### Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: ### 
 - Sprache: en"}]}';


$string = preg_replace("/[\r\n]+/", " ", $string);
$json = utf8_encode($string);
$json = json_decode($json);
var_dump($json);

Output

object(stdClass)[1]
  public 'projectnumber' => string '4444' (length=4)
  public 'projecdescription' => string '4444' (length=4)
  public 'articles' => 
    array
      0 => 
        object(stdClass)[2]
          public 'position' => int 1
          public 'article_id' => int 676
          public 'online_text' => string '### Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: DE   - Sprache: de' (length=78)
      1 => 
        object(stdClass)[3]
          public 'position' => int 2
          public 'article_id' => int 681
          public 'online_text' => string '### Behälter; Band I-III nach indiv. Stückliste, Sprache: ###   - Sprache: en' (length=79)

Answer 2

Voting for the newline too

json_decode_nice + keep linebreaks:

function json_decode_nice($json, $assoc = TRUE){
    $json = str_replace("\n","\\n",$json);
    $json = str_replace("\r","",$json);
    $json = preg_replace('/([{,]+)(\s*)([^"]+?)\s*:/','$1"$3":',$json);
    $json = preg_replace('/(,)\s*}$/','}',$json);
    return json_decode($json,$assoc);
}

If you want to keep the linebreaks just escape the slash.

You don't need utf-8 encode, if everything is set to utf-8 (header, db connection, etc)

Answer 3

$string = preg_replace("/[\r\n]+/", " ", $string);
$json = utf8_encode($string);
$json = json_decode($json);
var_dump($json);