translate a unicode string

I don’t know but it’s like this &#20809 ;

That looks like a URL-escaped string. It will work in a web-view, but not in a Corona text string. You’ll need to get that into UTF-8.

I was hoping that url.unescape() would work, but it didn’t, so unfortunately I’m not aware of anything that converts such escaped strings to UTF-8-characters in Corona.

Where does the Chinese text come from?

It would be best if the text in the file on the server was UTF-8 to begin with.

Another option would to do a urldecode() on the string in your PHP script.

It is already in UTF-8 though, but still thanks for the info, it comes from the server it will be manually inputed, by now I copy paste it

I still think that a urldecode() in your PHP script thats builds your JSON response would do the job…