String with a "b" prefix on records with accent - php

Question

When I dump the property of my model and it has an accent it returns with this "b" prefix
dump($venda_item->produto->nomeproduto); // b"teste téste"
My database is setted to utf8 and utf8_general_ci collation
This causes me the following error Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded when I'm returning the response in json, at this line
$json_response = Response::json($response, $this->getStatusCode(), $headers);
Update
I discovered that if I die and dump the record on the web route it shows normal teste téste
Route::get('/', function () {
dd(App\Vendasitem::where('codigovi', 112685)->first()->produto->nomeproduto);
}
otherwise if I do the same in the controller or request and other files that I tryied it keeps returning me with the "b" prefix
Update 2
If I save my record like this PROMO - VIRICAPS (GUARANá + POLIVIT) 60 CáPS - CAIXA 18 UND and dump($venda_item->produto->nomeproduto); it returns me the right result with the accents.
All my database, including the column is set up to utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Answer 1

If you already confirmed the encoding on your database. Have a look on config/database.php, on charset and collation proprieties.
'charset' => 'utf8',
'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci'
If the issue is on the "print" then you might use the utf8_encode function.
{{utf8_encode($yourVar)}}

Answer 2

I had this problem when importing data from a different database. Solved with this method, maybe it works for you to.
public function fixEncoding($str) {
return mb_check_encoding($str, 'UTF-8')
? html_entity_decode($str)
: utf8_encode(html_entity_decode($str));
}

Answer 3

So, it looks like your best bet is to write a accessor for the object using iconv:
public function getNomeprodutoAttribute($value) {
return iconv("utf-8", "utf-8//ignore", $value);
}
Unless you want to recode the whole database, which probably isn't an option.
The value passed in will the value out of the database (which is the unfortunate binary data). Then you are telling it the input is utf (which it is), and that the output is utf8 (which we want) but to ignore chars that aren't supported in utf-8. //ignore may work in some versions of the library, so you'd just have to do the following, and hope for the best:
public function getNomeprodutoAttribute($value) {
return iconv("utf-8", "utf-8", $value);
}

Answer 4

Use this function
public function utf8ize($value) {
if (is_array($value)) {
foreach ($value as $k => $v) {
$value[$k] = utf8ize($v);
}
} else if (is_string ($value)) {
return utf8_encode($value);
}
return $value;
}