'Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded' in Laravel

Question

I'm using Laravel (a PHP framework) to write a service for mobile and have the data returned in JSON format. In the data result there are some fields encoded in UTF-8.

The following statement

return JsonResponse::create($data); 

returns the error below

InvalidArgumentException
HELP
Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded

Open: /var/www/html/vendor/symfony/http-foundation/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/JsonResponse.php
        } catch (\Exception $exception) {
            restore_error_handler();

            throw $exception;
        }

        if (JSON_ERROR_NONE !== json_last_error()) {
            throw new \InvalidArgumentException($this->transformJsonError());
        }

I've changed:

return JsonResponse::create($data);

to

return JsonResponse::create($data, 200, array('Content-Type'=>'application/json; charset=utf-8' ));

but it still isn't working.

How can I fix it?

Answer 1

I wrote this method to handle UTF8 arrays and JSON problems. It works fine with array (simple and multidimensional).

/**
 * Encode array from latin1 to utf8 recursively
 * @param $dat
 * @return array|string
 */
   public static function convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($dat)
   {
      if (is_string($dat)) {
         return utf8_encode($dat);
      } elseif (is_array($dat)) {
         $ret = [];
         foreach ($dat as $i => $d) $ret[ $i ] = self::convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($d);

         return $ret;
      } elseif (is_object($dat)) {
         foreach ($dat as $i => $d) $dat->$i = self::convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($d);

         return $dat;
      } else {
         return $dat;
      }
   }
// Sample use
// Just pass your array or string and the UTF8 encode will be fixed
$data = convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($data);

Answer 2

I found the answer to this problem here

Just do

mb_convert_encoding($data['name'], 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');

Answer 3

In my case I had a ucfirst on the asian letters string. This was not possible and produced a non utf8 string.

Answer 4

In Laravel 7.x, this helped me to get rid of this error.

$newString = mb_convert_encoding($arr, "UTF-8", "auto");
return response()->json($newString);