json - SerializeJSON doesn't encode UTF8 characters in ColdFusion 9

Question

I'm having some issues with ColdFusion and JSON. My users have filenames and other key words with characters like ? in them which is causing me a pain when I have to pass them back via JSON.

When I use the magic JSON command on my variable:

<cfcontent type="application/json"> 
<cfset variables.stGalleryItem = StructNew() />
<cfset variables.stGalleryItem["imagePath"] = siteRoot & '/images/350460/hell?.txt' />
<cfset variables.stGalleryItem["title"] = '????'  />
<cfset variables.stGalleryItem["author"] = 'HI' />
<cfset variables.stGalleryItem["text"] = 'aa' />
<cfset ArrayAppend(variables.arrGallery,variables.stGalleryItem) />

<cfoutput>
  #Trim(SerializeJSON(variables.arrGallery))#
</cfoutput>

The character that gets spit out is ?, which does no one any good.

Is there anything I can do to preserve my users' ??

Answer 1

You need to specify the Character Set in your CFCONTENT tag. I tried this code in Google Chrome without charset and it returned the text correctly. However, FireFox 3.6 returned the incorrect characters you listed.

This correctly returns the UTF-8 characters in Chrome, FireFox and MSIE:

<cfcontent type="application/json; charset=utf-8">