JSON Encoding Struggles with UTF-8 Characters in MySQL

When attempting to retrieve accented characters from a database with latin1_swedish_ci encoding and encode them into JSON using json_encode(), the result may be unexpected. The intended outcome, such as "Abord â Plouffe," is transformed into "null," rendering the encoded JSON invalid.

To resolve this issue, it is necessary to encode the retrieved values into UTF-8 explicitly before applying json_encode(). This ensures that the JSON output contains the correct UTF-8 characters and validates accordingly. Here is how to implement this solution:

// Initialize an empty array for the encoded result set
$rows = array();

// Iterate over the PHPMyAdmin result set
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  // Apply UTF-8 encoding to each row value
  $rows[] = array_map('utf8_encode', $row);
}

// Output the encoded $rows
echo json_encode($rows);

In this modified code, we utilize the array_map function to apply utf8_encode to each element of every row in the result set. This ensures that all characters are properly encoded into UTF-8 before json_encode is executed. Consequently, the resulting JSON output will reflect the intended characters accurately, preserving the accented characters as desired.