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

I found the following answer for an analogous problem with a nested array not utf-8 encoded that i had to json encode:

$inputArray = array(
    'a'=>'First item - à',
    'c'=>'Third item - é'
);
$inputArray['b']= array (
          'a'=>'First subitem - ù',
          'b'=>'Second subitem - ì'
    );
 if (!function_exists('recursive_utf8')) {
  function recursive_utf8 ($data) {
     if (!is_array($data)) {
        return utf8_encode($data);
     }
     $result = array();
     foreach ($data as $index=>$item) {
        if (is_array($item)) {
           $result[$index] = array();
           foreach($item as $key=>$value) {
              $result[$index][$key] = recursive_utf8($value);
           }
        }
        else if (is_object($item)) {
           $result[$index] = array();
           foreach(get_object_vars($item) as $key=>$value) {
              $result[$index][$key] = recursive_utf8($value);   
           }
        } 
        else {
           $result[$index] = recursive_utf8($item);
        }
     }
     return $result; 
   }
}
$outputArray =  json_encode(array_map('recursive_utf8', $inputArray ));