Cyrillic characters in PHP’s json_encode

I’m trying to encode Cyrillic UTF-8 array to JSON string using php’s function json_encode. The sample code looks like this:

<?php
  $arr = array(
     'едно' => 'първи',
     'две' => 'втори'
  );
  $str = json_encode($arr);
  echo $str;
?>

It works fine but the result of the script is represented as:

{"u0435u0434u043du043e":"u043fu044au0440u0432u0438","u0434u0432u0435":"u0432u0442u043eu0440u0438"}

which makes 6 characters for each Cyrillic character. Is there a way to get the original characters for key/value pairs instead of encoded ones?

Answer

Can’t you use JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE constant here?