There is a good function to sanitize your arrays.
I suggest you use a json_encode wrapper like this :
function safe_json_encode($value, $options = 0, $depth = 512, $utfErrorFlag = false) {
$encoded = json_encode($value, $options, $depth);
switch (json_last_error()) {
case JSON_ERROR_NONE:
return $encoded;
case JSON_ERROR_DEPTH:
return 'Maximum stack depth exceeded'; // or trigger_error() or throw new Exception()
case JSON_ERROR_STATE_MISMATCH:
return 'Underflow or the modes mismatch'; // or trigger_error() or throw new Exception()
case JSON_ERROR_CTRL_CHAR:
return 'Unexpected control character found';
case JSON_ERROR_SYNTAX:
return 'Syntax error, malformed JSON'; // or trigger_error() or throw new Exception()
case JSON_ERROR_UTF8:
$clean = utf8ize($value);
if ($utfErrorFlag) {
return 'UTF8 encoding error'; // or trigger_error() or throw new Exception()
}
return safe_json_encode($clean, $options, $depth, true);
default:
return 'Unknown error'; // or trigger_error() or throw new Exception()
}
}
function utf8ize($mixed) {
if (is_array($mixed)) {
foreach ($mixed as $key => $value) {
$mixed[$key] = utf8ize($value);
}
} else if (is_string ($mixed)) {
return utf8_encode($mixed);
}
return $mixed;
}
In my application utf8_encode() works better than iconv()