PHP UTF-8 encoding echoes question marks

Question

I'm trying to echo a json_response with unicode characters using the following code:

function utf8ize($d) {
if (is_array($d)) {
    foreach ($d as $k => $v) {
        $d[$k] = utf8ize($v);
    }
} else if (is_string ($d)) {
    return utf8_encode($d);
}
return $d;
}

used like this:

echo json_encode(utf8ize($response));

The problem with this is that some characters are encoded properly and other characters like ć and ś are sent as question marks as seen in the below image:

I'm not sure how to fix this.

Answer 1

According to http://php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php utf8_encode encodes data from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

However, Polish lang has iso-8859-2 charset so you should use

iconv('iso-8859-2', 'utf-8', $d) instead of utf8_encode($d)