Special characters (ë) in JSON-response

1
votes

My database stores some texts which I have to get with AJAX. This is going well but only when it not contains special characters such as ë or ä. I found some articles about this topic which told me to change the charset of the AJAX-request, but none of these worked for me.

When I start firebug it said this about the headers:

Antwoordheaders (dutch for responseheaders)
Cache-Control no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Connection close
Content-Length 94
Content-Type text/html; charset=ISO-8859-15
Date Wed, 26 Sep 2012 09:52:56 GMT
Expires Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Pragma no-cache
Server Apache
X-Powered-By PleskLin

Verzoekheaders (dutch for requestheaders)
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Language nl,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Authorization Basic c3BvdGlkczp6SkBVajRrcw==
Connection keep-alive
Content-Type text/html; charset=ISO-8859-15
Cookie __utma=196329838.697518114.1346065716.1346065716.1346065716.1; __utmz=196329838.1346065716.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); PHPSESSID=2h4vu8gu9v8fe5l1t3ad5agp86
DNT 1
Host www.spotids.com
Referer http://www.spotids.com/private/?p=16
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1

Both of the headers are talking about charset=ISO-8859-15 which should include characters like ë, but it doesn't work for me.

The code I used for this (PHP): 

`$newresult = mysql_query($query2);    
    $result = array();
    while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($newresult))
    {
        array_push($result, $row);
    }
    $jsonText = json_encode($result);
    echo $jsonText;`
3
phpajaxjsonspecial-characters
By standards, you should deliver JSON data in UTF-8, most likely. ISO-8859-15 may contain the characters you need, but is that the format your JSON is in? Probably not, since it's being taken straight out of MySQL. It's anyone's guess how MySQL is storing and delivering the text to you, which is why it's best to just force everything to use UTF-8. – John Chadwick

3 Answers

6
votes

  1. Make sure you set the headers to UTF-8:

    header('Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8');

  2. Make sure your connection to database is made with UTF-8 encoding before any queries:

    $query = mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'");

  3. As far as I know, JSON encodes any characters that cannot be represented in pure ASCII. And you should decode that JSON on response.

  4. Try to move to PDO as mysql_* functions are deprecated. Use this nice tutorial

1
votes

From JSON RFC-4627 : JSON text SHALL be encoded in Unicode. The default encoding is UTF-8. Use mb_convert_encoding or iconv to change string encoding.

And send correct header:

header('Content-Type: application/json;charset=utf-8');
echo json_encode($data);
0
votes

verify the Content-Type meat 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />