Error encoding model: Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded

JSON doesnt like non UTF-8 data.

Try saving it as htmlentities before JSON encoding.

    $test = array( 'name' => 'Özyaprak - Tüzün' );
    $test['bnamela'] = htmlentities( $test['name'] );

    echo json_encode( $test );

You can also try:

return response()->json(Employee::find(202), 200, [], JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE); 

it just might work

Thanks @lostdreamer_nl.

I tried your first suggestion which worked. However, I'd now consider the data in my database to be faulty as the name would be stored as 'Özyaprak - Tüzün'. This would only cause more problems for the rest of the application. It doesn't seem worth it to have to decode this everywhere I use it in the project (not just Blade/Vue).

Your second suggestion I had already tried but doesn't seem to make a difference.

Does calling json_encode() on that employee's name directly work?

@36864 I suppose. I tried it with the following snippet:

$employee = Employee::select('id', 'initialen', 'voornaam', 'achternaam')->find(202);
$employee->achternaam = json_encode($employee->achternaam);

return response()->json($employee);

Which gives us:

{"id":202,"initialen":"D.","voornaam":"Derya","achternaam":"\"\u00d6zyaprak - T\u00fcz\u00fcn\"","fullname":"Derya \"\u00d6zyaprak - T\u00fcz\u00fcn\""}

Vue then shows this as

"\u00d6zyaprak - T\u00fcz\u00fcn"

It of course adds a set of quotation marks due to the double json_encode (mine and response()->json())

Could you try a couple more things for me please? Tinker would be great for rapidly testing this:

$employee = Employee::find(202);
$employee->toArray();
$employee->jsonSerialize();
$employee->toJson();

@36864 You've put me on the right path and we've found the issue! I have an attribute which is automatically appended to an entity via the following method on the model:

public function getInitialsAttribute()
{
    return substr($this->voornaam, 0, 1) . substr($this->achternaam, 0, 1);
}

This seemed to be the evil doer. The command you had me run in Tinker all show the following value for initials:

=> [
     "id" => 202,
     "initialen" => "D.",
     "voornaam" => "Derya",
     "achternaam" => "Özyaprak - Tüzün",
     "initials" => b"DÃ",
     ...
   ]

b"DÃ"is not a very valid value =) I removed the attribute and everything worked. Now I just need to fix this little method but that's a piece of cake.

Thanks @36864!

Edit: Changing substr to mb_substr solved that issue. :)

Thanks for solving the hard part, I ran into the same issue when splitting up a username. Instead of using raw mb_substr I ended up using Laravel's native Str::substr() which was a drop-in replacement, and solve the issue.