Converting these types of unicode to UTF8 in PHP

Question

I am trying to convert this in to readable UTF8 text in PHP

Tel Aviv-Yafo (Hebrew: \u05ea\u05b5\u05bc\u05dc\u05be\u05d0\u05b8\u05d1\u05b4\u05d9\u05d1-\u05d9\u05b8\u05e4\u05d5\u05b9; Arabic: \u062a\u0644 \u0623\u0628\u064a\u0628\u200e, Tall \u02bcAb\u012bb), usually called Tel Aviv

Any ideas on how to do so?

Tried several methods online, but couldn't find one.

In this case I have unicode in Hebrew and Arabic

Answer 1

None of the other answers work perfectly as is. I've combined them together and my addition results in this one:

$replacedString = preg_replace("/\\\\u([0-9abcdef]{4})/", "&#x$1;", $originalString);
$unicodeString = mb_convert_encoding($replacedString, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');

This one definitely does work :)

Answer 2

I encountered the same problem recently, so was glad to see this question. Doing some tests, I found the following code works:

$replacedString = preg_replace("/\\\\u([0-9abcdef]{4})/", "&#x$1;", $original_string);
//$unicodeString    = mb_convert_encoding($replacedString, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES'); 

The only thing I changed is that I commented out the 2nd line of code. Webpage, however, must be set to display UTF-8.

Enjoy!