👀 Views: 31 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

php json mbstring PHP

I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm collaborating on a project where I'm converting an old project and I'm working with a question when trying to return a JSON response in my PHP 8.1 application..... I'm using the `mb_convert_encoding` function to ensure that all strings are properly encoded before they're sent back to the client. However, when I encode the response using `json_encode`, I often receive an behavior about invalid UTF-8 characters, even though the string appears to be correctly formatted. Here's a snippet of my code: ```php $data = [ 'name' => mb_convert_encoding($userInput['name'], 'UTF-8', 'auto'), 'email' => mb_convert_encoding($userInput['email'], 'UTF-8', 'auto') ]; header('Content-Type: application/json'); $response = json_encode($data); if ($response === false) { echo 'JSON behavior: ' . json_last_error_msg(); } ``` I've confirmed that `$userInput['name']` and `$userInput['email']` are correctly encoded before calling `json_encode`, but I still get the following behavior: `JSON behavior: Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded`. I've tried using `utf8_encode` instead of `mb_convert_encoding`, but that didn't resolve the scenario either. Also, my `mbstring` extension is enabled, and I've set the internal character encoding to UTF-8 using `mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');`. What could be causing this scenario? Are there any specific best practices I should follow when handling multibyte strings and JSON encoding in PHP 8.1? Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking? Has anyone else encountered this? My development environment is Ubuntu 22.04. Is this even possible? For reference, this is a production mobile app. Has anyone else encountered this?