Values in UTF-8 being encoded as NULL in JSON

Question

I have a set of keywords that are passed through via JSON from a DB (encoded UTF-8), some of which may have special characters like é, è, ç, etc. This is used as part of an auto

Answer 1

json_encode seems to be dropping strings that contain invalid characters. It is likely that your UTF-8 data is not arriving in the proper form from your database.

Looking at the examples you give, my wild guess would be that your database connection is not UTF-8 encoded and serves ISO-8859-1 characters instead.

Can you try a SET NAMES utf8; after initializing the connection?