Well after 2 hours of digging (cf Edits)
I found out following :
- In my case it’s a encoding problem
mb_detect_encoding
returns probably a faulty response, some strings were probably not UTF-8- using
utf8_encode()
on those string solved my problem, but see note below
Here is a recursive function that can force convert to UTF-8 all the strings contained in an array:
function utf8ize($d) {
if (is_array($d)) {
foreach ($d as $k => $v) {
$d[$k] = utf8ize($v);
}
} else if (is_string ($d)) {
return utf8_encode($d);
}
return $d;
}
Use it simply like this:
echo json_encode(utf8ize($data));
Note: utf8_encode() encodes ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8 as per the docs so if you are unsure of the input encoding iconv() or mb_convert_encoding() may be better options as noted in comments and other solutions.