You didn't show us the code you used to print out the JSON results. \x{} is perl syntax, not JSON, so I suspect it may have been inserted on your end if you used Data::Dumper. Your second example is a curly quote that's been UTF-8 encoded and then interpreted as Windows-1252. Regular apostrophes don't have this problem, only curly ones. Also, it would help us understand what's going on if you posted the original JSON, not just what you decoded it to.