array_map产生奇怪的unicode字符

Question

I'm newbie in PHP so sorry for any funny mistakes :(

I have a problem when try to get some unicode characters (Korean, actually) from database to an javascript array. I think after call array_map("utf8_encode", $row); the field I needed has weird character. This is the file to do that business:

<?php
    include 'ChromePhp.php';
    ChromePhp::log('Hello console!');

    $mysql = new mysqli('localhost','root','vertrigo','demo', 3306);
    $mysql->set_charset("utf8");
    $result = $mysql->query("select * from countries");
    $rows = array();
    while($row = $result->fetch_array(MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
        $rows[] = array_map("utf8_encode", $row);
        ChromePhp::log($row); // fine, readable characters
    }
    ChromePhp::log($rows); // weird characters
    echo json_encode($rows);

    $result->close();
    $mysql->close();

?>

I also set the main page and the script charset=utf8 like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8" />

and

<script src="lib/jquery/jquery-1.11.1.min.js" charset="utf8"></script>
    <!-- Include all compiled plugins (below), or include individual files as needed -->
    <script src="lib/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js" charset="utf8"></script>
    <script src="lib/magicsuggest/magicsuggest.js" charset="utf8"></script>
    <script src="js/script.js" charset="utf8"></script>

The original code's here. I just add a test record with this sql command:

INSERT INTO `demo`.`countries` (`idCountry`, `countryCode`, `countryName`, `population`, `capital`, `continentName`) VALUES (NULL, 'KO', 'KOR', '134', '서울', 'Asia');

Answer 1

According to utf8_encode

utf8_encode — Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8

Since you're dealing with Korean characters, I suspect the strings are not ISO-8859-1 encoded.

Depending on the database settings, there is no need to convert the strings at all.