This is a follow up of this question: Remove accents from a JSON response.

The accepted answer there works for a single item/string of a raw JSON content. But I would like to run a full transformation over the entire raw content of the JSON without parsing each object/array/item.

What I've tried is this

function removeAccents($jsoncontent) {
    $obj=json_decode($jsoncontent); // use decode to transform the unicode chars to utf
    $content=serialize($obj); // serialize into string, so the whole obj structure can be used string as a whole
    $a = 'ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûýýþÿRr';
    $b = 'aaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnoooooouuuuybsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnoooooouuuyybyRr';    
    $content=utf8_decode($content);
    $jsoncontent = strtr($content, $a, $b);
    // at this point the accents are removed, and everything is good
    echo $jsoncontent;
    $obj=unserialize($jsoncontent); // this unserialization is returning false, probably because we messed up with the serialized string    
    return json_encode($obj);
}

As you see after I decoded JSON content, I serialized the object to have a string of it, than I remove the accents from that string, but this way I have problem building back the object, as the unserialize stuff returns false.

How can I fix this?