json encode Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument

Question

I m calling json encode   on data that comes from a MySQL database with utf8 general ci collation  The problem is that some rows have weird data which I can t clean  For example symbol    so once it reaches json encode    it fails with json encode    Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument   I ve tried utf8 encode   and utf8 decode    even with mb check encoding   but it keeps getting through and causing havoc    Running PHP 5 3 10 on Mac  So the question is - how can I clean up invalid utf8 symbols  keeping the rest of data  so that json encoding   would work   Update  Here is a way to reproduce it   echo json encode pack  H     c32e

User · Answer

I had a similar error which caused json encode to return a null field whenever there was a hi-ascii character such as a curly apostrophe in a string  due to the wrong character set being returned in the query   The solution was to make sure it comes as utf8 by adding   mysql set charset  utf8      after the mysql connect statement

User · Answer

json encode works only with UTF-8 data  You ll have to ensure that your data     is in UTF-8  alternatively  you can use iconv   to convert your results to UTF-8 before feeding them to json encode

User · Answer

I am very late but if some one working on SLIM to make rest api and getting same error can solve this problem by adding below line as    lt  php     DbConnect php file class DbConnect         Variable to store database link     private  con         Class constructor     function   construct                       This method will connect to the database     function connect                   Including the constants php file to get the database constants         include once dirname   FILE        Constants php              connecting to mysql database          this- gt con   new mysqli DB HOST  DB USERNAME  DB PASSWORD  DB NAME            mysqli set charset  this- gt con   utf8       add this line            Checking if any error occured while connecting         if  mysqli connect errno                  echo  Failed to connect to MySQL      mysqli connect error                         finally returning the connection link         return  this- gt con

User · Answer

Another thing that throws this error  when you use php s json encode function  is when unicode characters are upper case  U and not lower case  u

User · Answer

Seems like the symbol was     but since data consists of surnames that shouldn t be public  only first letter was shown and it was done by just  lastname 0   which is wrong for multibyte strings and caused the whole hassle  Changed it to mb substr  lastname  0  1  - works like a charm

User · Answer

The symbol you posted is the placeholder symbol for a broken byte sequence  Basically  it s not a real symbol but an error in your string   What is the exact byte value of the symbol  Blindly applying utf8 encode is not a good idea  it s better to find out first where the byte s  came from and what they mean

User · Answer

The problem is that this character is UTF8  but json encode does not handle it correctly  To say more  there is a list of other characters  see Unicode characters list   that will trigger the same error  so stripping off this one      will not correct an issue to the end   What we have used is to convert these chars to html entities like this   htmlentities   string   value  ENT QUOTES   utf-8   FALSE

User · Answer

Using this code might help  It solved my problem     mb convert encoding  post  post    UTF-8   UTF-8      or like that  mb convert encoding  string  UTF-8   UTF-8

User · Answer

Make sure that your connection charset to MySQL is UTF-8  It often defaults to ISO-8859-1 which means that the MySQL driver will convert the text to ISO-8859-1   You can set the connection charset with mysql set charset  mysqli set charset or with the query SET NAMES  utf-8

User · Answer

Using setLocale  fr FR UTF8   before json encode solved the problem

User · Answer

Updated   I solved this issue by stating the charset on PDO connection as below    mysql host  host dbname  db charset utf8   All data received was then in the correct charset for the rest of the code to use

[php] json_encode(): Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument

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