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phpencodingodooxml-rpcdiacritics

Weird encoding issue in XML-RPC call

I'm retrieving from Odoo 9 on Ubuntu 14.04 ENG a list of partners via XML-RPC using PHP and ripcord

Some names contain one or more diacritics:

  • Pièr
  • Frère Pièr

All those names have been entered from a single computer running Windows 8.1 using one version of Chrome.

The strange fact is that I get a list where some diacritics are correct, some other have encoding problems, like:

  • Pi�r
  • Fr�re Pièr

The same diacritic in the same string is correctly encoded or not.

In subsequent calls the result is always the same.

If I edit the string, then it could change the results, giving

  • Frère Pi�r
  • Frère Pièr
  • Fr�re Pi�r...

I need to output a JSON, and thus I need to encode this in UTF-8: but it is currently impossible since I don't have a clue of what encoding the original text is (and it seems to not have any encoding at all!)

Any idea?

Solution

  • I found out that the incoming array was in charset "Latin1"

    I solved normalizing the array generated from the XML-RPC output, recursively applying a multbyte conversion function:

    // given an XML-RPC output named $arr_output...

function descramble_diacritics(&$entry, $key) {
    $entry = mb_convert_encoding($entry, 'UTF-8', 'Latin1');
}
array_walk_recursive($arr_output, 'descramble_diacritics');

header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo json_encode($arr_output);