jQuery/Ajax - decoding non-Latin data; how to deal with escaping Greek chars

Question

I'm having trouble decoding Greek text when using ajaxed infinite scrolling. It's the first time I'm dealing with non-English data, but as far as I understand every single Greek character needs to be escaped, because otherwise Ajax breaks trying so send the characters.

I make it Ajax-friendly by escaping it with this (PHP):

function utf8ize($d) {  // Encoding workaround

    if(is_array($d)) {

        foreach ($d as $k => $v) {

            $d[$k] = utf8ize($v);
        }

    } elseif (is_string ($d)) {

        return utf8_encode($d);
    }

    return $d;
}

so this

Το γράμμα άλφα (ἄλφα) είναι το πρώτο γράμμα του ελληνικού αλφαβήτου.

becomes this:

Το γÏάμμα άλφα (ἄλφα) είναι το Ï€Ïώτο γÏάμμα του ÎµÎ»Î»Î·Î½Î¹ÎºÎ¿Ï Î±Î»Ï†Î±Î²Î®Ï„Î¿Ï….

which is how the text looks raw on my UK-locale database. But now I am not sure how to convert it back to Greek on the front-end.

Normally I would successfully decode non Basic Latin words like café, fiancé, façade using PHP's utf8_encode at back-end and then jQuery's decodeURIComponent on front-end, but with Greek this error comes up

URIError: URI malformed

Is there an in-built jQuery function to convert utf-8 into another format that supports Greek at front-end?

This is how it looks on default load:

And this is what happens when I try to inject the same text via Ajax

Answer 1

I figured out the problem thanks to @Hackerman and @HarryPehkonen comments.

The original problem was that the Greek text also had hyperlinks with mixed characters.

For example Greek links have Latin-based domain names, but use Greek for semantic slugs.

Which look Greek in the URL bar, but are actually already URL encoded and look like this when copy-pasted into text editor.

https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%B7%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C_%CE%B1%CE%BB%CF%86%CE%AC%CE%B2%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%BF

And it's the last part that seemed to break things.

So in sample input

Το γράμμα <b >άλφα</b> (<i >ἄλφα</i>) είναι το πρώτο γράμμα του <a href="https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%B7%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C_%CE%B1%CE%BB%CF%86%CE%AC%CE%B2%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%BF" title="Ελληνικό αλφάβητο" >ελληνικού αλφαβήτου</a>.

Trying to utf8_encode and then json_encode a string which already contains URL encoded sections resulted in the string being neither when decoded back at front-end.

Modifying my utf8ize() function to do an extra iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8', $d) fixed the problem.

function utf8ize($d) {  // Encoding workaround

    if(is_array($d)) {

        foreach ($d as $k => $v) {

            $d[$k] = utf8ize($v);
        }

    } elseif (is_string ($d)) {

       return utf8_encode(iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8', $d));
    }

    return $d;
}