CakePHP Variable containing an array of models becomes inaccessible? - php

Question

So I'm building this small REST API for a part of a website so I can load comments asynchronously, after the main content has loaded. But every time my dataset goes above 25 entries the variable where I store the comments becomes completely inaccessible.
This is exactly the database find operation I'm doing:
// A nice default before responding
$response = array('status'=>'error','message'=>'Request incomplete');
// [...] Some validation stuff
// $response is perfectly accessible here
$response = $this->Comment->find(
'threaded',
array(
'conditions' => array(
'Comment.object_class' => $query['object_class'],
'Comment.object_id' => $query['object_id'] ,
'Comment.status' => 'approved'
),
'order' => 'Comment.created ASC'
// No limits, I need all the comments
)
);
// $response is not accessible anymore
// So my JSON response below comes absolutely empty;
$this->set('response',$response);
$this->set('_serialize',array('response'));
By the time I use $this->set('_serialize',array('response')); to be able to send the JSON response the $comments variable is still inaccessible, so my response comes back empty, at 0 length, which of course is pretty bothersome and very confusing.
I've experienced this problem before and have found that it solves by requesting a limited set of entries, but in this case I need the entire comment list, don't wanna do several requests and kill the purpose. Is there a limit to what Cake can retrieve from the database and keep usable in the Controllers? Am I missing something here?
I also tried "manually " doing a json_encode($response); but since the problem is that the $response var is inaccessible/empty then of course it fails as well.
The json response does work for some 25 comments or less, but many of the website entries have more comments than that, up to 100 comments! How can I solve this weird issue?

Answer 1

So after souting the Internet in search of a concrete answer and ending up in the #cakephp IRC channel, a very kind fellow suggested my data may have some encoding mistakes.
Turns out he was correct about it, and the comments table still had some comments that were encoded as latin1. Back in the day I moved the database to utf8, but it was just a charset change, not an actual text encoding conversion for every entry.
After a quick search I found this post which instructs you about how to move loads of data from latin1 to utf8 with three simple cli lines.
I hope this serves someone else that may encouter this issue and doesn't know what to do about it :)
Thanks to those who commented on the question.