Handling JSON Decode Errors in PHP 8.1 with Invalid UTF-8 Characters
This might be a silly question, but I'm trying to debug I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm working with an scenario while decoding JSON data in PHP 8.1. The JSON data I'm trying to decode sometimes contains invalid UTF-8 characters, and when I call `json_decode`, it returns `null` and generates a warning: `json_decode(): Invalid UTF-8 sequence in string`. I've already tried sanitizing the input by using `mb_convert_encoding`, but it doesn't always resolve the scenario. Here's the code snippet where I'm decoding the JSON: ```php $jsonData = '{"name": "John", "age": "30", "city": "New York"}'; // Example JSON data $jsonData .= "\x80"; // Appending an invalid UTF-8 character $decodedData = json_decode($jsonData, true); if (json_last_error() !== JSON_ERROR_NONE) { echo 'JSON behavior: ' . json_last_error_msg(); } ``` Despite trying to validate the string before decoding, the invalid character still slips through. Can someone suggest a reliable way to handle or filter out invalid UTF-8 sequences before decoding? I'm looking for a solution that doesn't involve extensive pre-processing to keep performance optimal, as this JSON decoding happens frequently in my application. This is part of a larger service I'm building. How would you solve this? Thanks in advance! My team is using Php for this application. I'd be grateful for any help. This issue appeared after updating to Php latest. How would you solve this?