json with special characters like é

Question

I\'m developing a dependent select script using jQuery, PHP and JSON as the response.

Everything goes well except for using special characters like French ones (é ,

Answer 1

This worked for me, hopefully it will work for anyone else experiencing similar issues.

$title = 'é';
$title = mb_convert_encoding($title, "UTF-8", "HTML-ENTITIES");

header('Content-Type: application/json; Charset="UTF-8"');
echo json_encode(array('title' => $title));

The mb_convert_encoding function takes a value and converts it from (in this case) HTML-ENTITIES to UTF-8.

See here for me details on the function http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php