PHP json encode - Malformed UTF-8 characters possibly incorrectly encoded

Question

I am using json_encode($data) on an array with Russian characters in the field. To display its encoding I used  mb_detect_encoding() and it displays UTF-8. I tried utf8_encode it bypass that error but the result is incorrect. Can someone please help me with this?

Answer 1

Even though the majority of the characters are utf8 characters, the problem arises if there are any non-utf8 characters inside. Now that it's working, this will eliminate any non-UTF8 characters.

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

I hope this helps you.