JSON payload problems, javascript encoding

Question

I have read a bunch of different StackOverflow answers and similar questions but none of them have been any help.

I am using Javascript to make an ajax request to get some data in json form.

I am receving json data such as the following:

\u0093title\u0094

Now I believe json is delivered in utf-8 by default, however these characters \u0093and \u0094 I believe are latin1 control characters meant to represent open and close speech marks.

The issue is when I make the GET with Javascript, the response ends up being something like:

Â“titleÂ”

I have tried doing encodeURIComponent( data.body )) and it produces the same result

This is extremely annoying, has anyone else encountered these issues before?

EDIT:

Imagine the following raw JSON data, this is what I am going to retrieve:

\u0093title\u0094

So for example, I run the following piece of jQuery/Javascript to get the above JSON data

                $.ajax({
                  type: "GET",
                  url: "myurl",
                  success: function(data){
                     console.log(data.body);
                  }
                });

The following is printed to the console (which looks fine, except it is omitting the control characters):

title

And then I encode and decode it, which should cancel out and change nothing:

console.log(decodeURIComponent(encodeURIComponent( data.body )))

Except this ends up printing the following:

Â“titleÂ”

Where it has picked up those extra Â characters as well as the “ and ”, despite these not showing up in the console before the encode/decode step

Essentially yes, or if I print it to the debug console it also comes out like that — user1079404
– user1079404, Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 23:30
Won't help, I am injecting the scripts after the page had loaded and rendered — user1079404
– user1079404, Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 23:40
U+0093 and U+0094 are non-printable characters. Are you sure you don't mean curved quotes? — MinusFour
– MinusFour, Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 0:35

MinusFour · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-08 00:38:02Z

1

First of all, Code Points U+0093 and U+0094 are not curved quotes, they are control characters for something else... (which to be quite honest, I have no idea). Curved Quotes code points are U+201C for “ and U+201D for ”. You still have another problem:

This pretty much looks like an example of incorrect decoding format. The program which is decoding the character saw: C2 93, the hex value of unicode point 0093. He's not assuming it's UTF-8 or he would have make a translation to unicode point 0093. Instead, it's using Windows Code Page-1252. Which makes: C2 into Â, 93 into “ and 94 into ”.

I could only think of 2 reasons why is it doing that but they all involve your browser. Is not really a problem with Javascript not using UTF-8, because this works:

document.getElementById('result').innerHTML = '\u201CHello\u201D';

<pre id="result"></pre>

The problem could be the HTTP response, your browser is reading the HTTP response as Windows Code Page-1252. The other thing it could be is because your browser is presenting data incorrectly (which now that i think of it, doesn't make much sense).

Try setting up the Content-Type of your HTTP response by sending this HTTP header:

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

And I insist that you put the:

<meta charset="utf-8">

To your document.

edited Aug 8, 2015 at 0:38

answered Aug 7, 2015 at 23:56

MinusFour

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1 Comment

user1079404 Over a year ago

Thank you for the long reply. I have updated my question to better reflect the nature of my question and hopefully give a better idea to what is happening - as I have this issue without even inserting anything into any HTML elements

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