Description:
------------
Feature request

As you can see here: http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php
people are jumping through hoops to encode variables of non-utf8 encodings into JSON format.

Why not just centralize that magic into the function itself as a new 3rd optional argument $encoding that defaults to UTF-8?


Reproduce code:
---------------
n/a

Expected result:
----------------
n/a

Actual result:
--------------
n/a