Flawed characters when encoding Russian letters

Question

I am querying a server for some information (returned as JSON), inter alia a list of names, and one of those names returns containing weird characters:

Ðемања Матејић

This is how it should be:

Немања Матејић

I have tried the following:

• Remove the BOM (byte-order mark) from the string (or else PHP won't decode the JSON), then decode it using json_decode and directly take the name and insert it into my UTF8-encoded MySQL database.
• Using a field with a UTF8 collation.

... to no avail - the value in the database still remains flawed.

How to solve this?

Edit:

Running SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%character%' returns

character_set_client    utf8
character_set_connection    utf8
character_set_database  utf8
character_set_filesystem    binary
character_set_results   utf8
character_set_server    latin1
character_set_system    utf8
character_sets_dir  /data/mysql/fuentez/share/mysql/charsets/

Is it possibly because character_set_server is latin1?

Answer 1

This is may be a kind handy to have json formath with russian simbols:

new json_decode fuunction

    <?php
    function json_encode_my($value) 
    {
        if (is_int($value)) {
            return (string)$value;   
        } elseif (is_string($value)) {
            $value = str_replace(array('\\', '/', '"', "\r", "\n", "\b", "\f", "\t"), 
                                 array('\\\\', '\/', '\"', '\r', '\n', '\b', '\f', '\t'), $value);
            $convmap = array(0x80, 0xFFFF, 0, 0xFFFF);
            $result = "";
            for ($i = mb_strlen($value) - 1; $i >= 0; $i--) {
                $mb_char = mb_substr($value, $i, 1);
                if (mb_ereg("&#(\\d+);", mb_encode_numericentity($mb_char, $convmap, "UTF-8"), $match)) {
                    $result = sprintf("\\u%04x", $match[1]) . $result;
                } else {
                    $result = $mb_char . $result;
                }
            }
            return '"' . $result . '"';                
        } elseif (is_float($value)) {
            return str_replace(",", ".", $value);         
        } elseif (is_null($value)) {
            return 'null';
        } elseif (is_bool($value)) {
            return $value ? 'true' : 'false';
        } elseif (is_array($value)) {
            $with_keys = false;
            $n = count($value);
            for ($i = 0, reset($value); $i < $n; $i++, next($value)) {
                        if (key($value) !== $i) {
                  $with_keys = true;
                  break;
                        }
            }
        } elseif (is_object($value)) {
            $with_keys = true;
        } else {
            return '';
        }
        $result = array();
        if ($with_keys) {
            foreach ($value as $key => $v) {
                $result[] = json_encode((string)$key) . ':' . json_encode($v);    
            }
            return '{' . implode(',', $result) . '}';                
        } else {
            foreach ($value as $key => $v) {
                $result[] = json_encode($v);    
            }
            return '[' . implode(',', $result) . ']';
        }

}
?>

Answer 2

You stored the data in the database as latin1 instead of UTF-8.

For example the string е encoded as latin1 becomes 0xd0 0xb5 which is the UTF-8 encoding of the Cyrillic letter е.