json_encode() non utf-8 strings?

Question

So I have an array of strings, and all of the strings are using the system default ANSI encoding and were pulled from a SQL database. So there are 256 diffe

Answer 1

The JSON standard ENFORCES Unicode encoding. From RFC4627:

3.  Encoding

   JSON text SHALL be encoded in Unicode.  The default encoding is
   UTF-8.

   Since the first two characters of a JSON text will always be ASCII
   characters [RFC0020], it is possible to determine whether an octet
   stream is UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE or LE), or UTF-32 (BE or LE) by looking
   at the pattern of nulls in the first four octets.

           00 00 00 xx  UTF-32BE
           00 xx 00 xx  UTF-16BE
           xx 00 00 00  UTF-32LE
           xx 00 xx 00  UTF-16LE
           xx xx xx xx  UTF-8

Therefore, on the strictest sense, ANSI encoded JSON wouldn't be valid JSON; this is why PHP enforces unicode encoding when using json_encode().

As for "default ANSI", I'm pretty sure that your strings are encoded in Windows-1252. It is incorrectly referred to as ANSI.