👀 Views: 91 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-03

php json utf-8 PHP

I'm working with an scenario when using `json_encode()` in PHP 7.4 to convert an array to JSON. The data being encoded includes special characters, particularly emojis and non-Latin characters. Instead of encoding correctly, I'm getting an empty string and a warning: `json_encode(): Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument`. Here’s the relevant snippet of my code: ```php $data = [ 'message' => 'Hello, world! 😊', 'language' => '日本語', ]; $json = json_encode($data); if ($json === false) { echo 'JSON encoding behavior: ' . json_last_error_msg(); } ``` I’ve checked the character encoding of the input data and confirmed it to be UTF-8. I've also tried using `mb_convert_encoding()` to ensure the characters are properly encoded, but it didn't help. Here’s what I tried: ```php $data['message'] = mb_convert_encoding($data['message'], 'UTF-8'); $data['language'] = mb_convert_encoding($data['language'], 'UTF-8'); $json = json_encode($data); ``` This still results in an empty string. Is there a better way to handle special characters when encoding to JSON in PHP? Any insights into what's going wrong here would be greatly appreciated!