带有PHP的重音字母：htmlentities和json_encode

Question

In my PHP webservice I have to return some arrays containing strings with accented letters in JSON format (I parse them in my client app with JS).

But the htmlentities function replaces the strings containing accented letters with empty strings! If I don't use htmlentities, I get an error on json_encode.

$a = array('key' => 'èàìòù');
foreach ($a as $k => $v)
    $a[$k] = htmlentities($v, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8');

json_encode($a);

I also tried the ENT_COMPAT option, but I get only empty values.

Note that if I print my array with print_r before htmlentities, the content is ok.

More information:

Every file is in UTF-8 w/o BOM format (saved with Notepad++). I already tried to add the headers to set UTF-8 in my PHP and HTML. The DB table is in utf8_unicode_ci format.

Versions: PHP 5.3.3, MySQL 5.5.30-1.

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

You're not specifying which error you are getting in json_encode(), but my suspicion is that your incoming data is not UTF-8 encoded, which will break both the unnecessary htmlentities() call (which you are instructing to expect UTF-8 data) and json_encode() (because that function requires all input data to be UTF-8).

Make sure the data you are encoding is actually UTF-8 encoded. You won't be needing htmlentites() at all then.

You're not saying where the data comes from, but if it's from a database, the connection sometimes needs to be explicitly set to UTF-8. See UTF-8 all the way through