title: convert js escaped char (or hex char?) in json_decoded string to html entity in php
body: <p>I have:
  <code>&lt;?php
  $results = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://....</code></p>
  
  <p>Within the echoed $results string, I get \xe9 instead of é, \xb0 instead of N°.
  I'm not sure what format the string I'm receiving is in? Since it's json, maybe this is javascript escaped special characters? If so, how would I go about unescaping it (and where)? I tried it in the ajax call (<code>html.(unescape(data))</code>) but that didn't work. Many of the posts I've read with similar issues suggest php's mb_convert_encoding() but I don't know what I'm trying to convert from ( or to, actually... html entities?) and it seems to take specific strings rather than an all characters with that format (\ xxx)?  Thanks for any insights. </p>