JRSofty Programming Blogs - SysLog

The Blog is Back

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:49:16 -0400

Well out of the silliness that is me I had accidently deleted the blog module a while back and didn't realize it until it was too late. Then my host has locked down the directory and file permissions so that I couldn't add it back. So I finally got around to getting the permissions on my modules directory set so that I can write to it again and have once again added the blog back to the site.

Of course this means that all the old content is lost. Bummer.

Problems with JSON encoding in PHP

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:23:02 -0400

Wow that's annoying. Things have been going well with the CiE framework. Had to make some changes to the template system (again) but I'm pretty confident that things are fixed now. The newest problem however is in the handling of AJAX or I should say AJAJ functionality that I'm including (or wanting to include) into the framework.

Now unless you are really familiar with AJAX and all its different forms then you are probably asking "What is AJAJ?". AJAJ stands for Asyncronous Javascript And JSON. Now you are probably asking what JSON is. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and basically is data transfer protocol that is both easily read by the human eye and easily parsed by computers. After doing a little research I was really happy to find that both the Firefox browser (as well as IE 8 but that's not important right now) and PHP 5.2 both natively handles JSON. PHP has two functions called json_encode and json_decode, which do the obvious. The problem is that there seems to be some problems with the json_encode when it comes to special characters. For example, "6 Treffen á 2 Stunden plus 1 Partnertag á 2 Stunden". It's the á that is causeing the problem. When it is encoded into the JSON it comes out as only 6 Treffen. So the question is what I should do? I could change all the data to remove the strange "a" character OR I build my own JSON encoder/decoder. Not sure which is the wisest way.

Problems Solved with PHP JSON encoding.

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:37:28 -0400

After doing some research I found the problem. It has to do with the character encoding. Before you can use JSON encode or decode in PHP it must be UTF8_encoded. Which is rather annoying that they didn't make that clear before. Once you have UTF8 encoded your data then you can use the JSON encoder.

The good thing is that I don't need to waste time building my own parser.