json_encode works bad with UTF8
I have had some serious problems with UTF8 and PHP’s built-in JSON functionality. After solving it, I realized that it was not even an UTF-8 issue, but a JSON one.
I faced serious problems while working on an AJAX pipeline that lets you execute PHP functions with JavaScript, using an automatic 1:1 mapping. In this framework, almost all functions – both static and instance ones – can be executed with a single line of JavaScript, which makes it easy to develop powerful AJAX behavior with almost no code.
When executing operations through the pipeline, I previously did the following:
- Build a JSON object with class name, object, function name and parameters.
- Send the JSON object together with some additional Wigbi data.
- Decode the JSON object.
- JSON-encode the parameters (returns an array string) and remove the start [ and end ].
- Build a string with the parameter string as function parameters and run eval on it.
However, I found that the last encoding step destroys some special characters. With these characters destroyed, the dynamic function fails to perform.
My new approach is to first collapse the parameter array to a string, instead of encoding it. This works, but some adjustments are needed to support arrays and objects. I will upload this today and work on a more sophisticated version tomorrow.
Many thanks to Mattias Sundberg for great and invaluable input!