Laravel - Russian Symbols in Output - php

Question

I have the following in my categories table. There are Russian symbols present:
id name
1 Обувь
Обувь = Obuv
I'm looking to get "Obuv" as Russian symbols within the output.
echo Category::select('name')->first();
This script should give me "Обувь" as the output, but I'm getting
{"name":"\u041e\u0431\u0443\u0432\u044c"}
What's wrong? How can I get the correct output? If I write "Obuv" in the database, the english "Obuv" will give me the correct output in Laravel. In phpMyAdmin, it gives me Russian symbols without trouble. The problem lies in Laravel.

Answer 1

You are outputting the data by echoing your Category model which outputs in JSON by default in Laravel. This automatically escapes multibyte Unicode characters upon output by default. When you run json_encode(), you could supply the JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE option like so:
$data = Category::select('name')->first();
echo json_encode($data, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);
I should be clear, though. Your Category does not have the escaped data stored within it, the escaping only takes place when you output to JSON. If all you were doing is ensuring you got the correct data back from the database by echoing it, you should be in the clear.
If you're looking for just the raw text of the category's name property, you should be able to output this like so:
echo $data->name;
For more information, see http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php and https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/how-to-prevent-laravel-from-returning-escaped-json-data.