title: Convert Unicode from JSON string with PHP
body: <p>I've been reading up on a few solutions but have not managed to get anything to work as yet.</p>
  
  <p>I have a JSON string that I read in from an API call and it contains Unicode characters - <code>\u00c2\u00a3</code> for example is the £ symbol.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like to use PHP to convert these into either <code>£</code> or <code>&amp;pound;</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking into the problem and found the following code (using my pound symbol to test) but it didn't seem to work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$title = preg_replace("/\\\\u([a-f0-9]{4})/e", "iconv('UCS-4LE','UTF-8',pack('V', hexdec('U$1')))", '\u00c2\u00a3');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output is <code>Â£</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Am I correct in thinking that this is UTF-16 encoded? How would I convert these to output as HTML?</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE</p>
  
  <p>It seems that the JSON string from the API has 2 or 3 unescaped Unicode strings, e.g.:</p>
  
  <pre><code>That\u00e2\u0080\u0099s (right single quotation)
  \u00c2\u00a (pound symbol)
  </code></pre>