How to save a JSON as unescaped UTF-8 in PHP 5.3?

Question

I created a JSON file:

$json = array(
    \"Sample\" =>array(
        \"context\" => $context,
        \"date\"    => $date
    )
);

$url= \"sample         


        

Answer 1

If you can't use JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, you could probably unescape the JSON yourself after it's been encoded:

$json = array(
    'Sample' => array(
        'context' => 'جمهوری اسلامی ایران'
    )
);

$encoded = json_encode($json);
var_dump($encoded); // context: "\u062c\u0645..."

$unescaped = preg_replace_callback('/\\\\u(\w{4})/', function ($matches) {
    return html_entity_decode('&#x' . $matches[1] . ';', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
}, $encoded);

var_dump($unescaped); // context is unescaped
file_put_contents('sample.json', $unescaped);

Here's an example in PHP5.3.

However, this shouldn't be necessary, as any JSON parser should correctly parse the escaped Unicode characters and give you back your original string.

EDIT: A better pattern to use might be /(?, which avoids incorrectly unescaping a JSON sequence like "\\u1234". See an example.