[SOLVED] Urdu / Arabic font data from MySQL is displaying as ????? in JSON

Urdu / Arabic font data from MySQL is displaying as ????? in JSON

I am developing an Android app with Urdu/Arabic data store in MySQL database on my web server and using JSON_Encoding to generate the JSON string. The JSON string is then being used in Android app to perform various functions (populating RecyclerView and other view objects with data). I am able to store Urdu / Arabic data in MySQL database, but when I use PHP script to generate JSON, all the fields containing Urdu characters is displaying data as ??????

I was using the utf8mb4_unicode_ci as I read the this is easy for storing non-English data and performing multiple functions, but after this encoding problem, I have changed that to utf8_general_ci for all the tables and fields in MySQL database. Below is the PHP script I am using to generate the JSON string from MySQL:

<?php

require "conn.php";

mysqli_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); 
mysqli_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8'); 

$sql_qry = "SELECT * FROM countrybasic;";

$result = mysqli_query($conn, $sql_qry);

$response = array();

while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){
    array_push($response, array("id"=>$row[0],"name"=>$row[1],"capital"=>$row[2],"continent"=>$row[3],"population"=>$row[4],"gdp"=>$row[5]));
}

echo json_encode(array("server_response"=>$response));

mysqli_close($conn);
?>

The Name and Capital fields are the ones I store my Urdu data in.

Please help me out to resolve this issue.

Thanks.

Solution

You just have to change the Charset to UTF8, and you can use these lines for PHP to do it:

$statSQL= 'SET CHARACTER SET utf8'; 

mysqli_query($your_db,$sSQL) 
or die ('charset in DB didn\'t change');

I hope this help :)