UTF-8 Encoding Error with Arabic Text in HasMany Relationship

[d-shannon]

• Laravel Version: 12.32.5
• Nova Version: 5.7.5
• PHP Version: 8.4
• Database Driver & Version: MySQL (utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation)
• Operating System and Version: Laravel Vapor / php-8.4:al2-arm

Description:

UTF-8 encoding error occurs when viewing a User resource with HasMany relationship containing Arabic text. Error message: "Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded" in /vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Http/JsonResponse.php:89

Individual Email resources display correctly, but the HasMany relationship table fails to render. Database uses utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation, and json_encode(User::with('emails')->find($id)->toArray()) works successfully in direct Laravel tests, which appears to indicate the issue is specific to Nova's HasMany serialization.

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue on a fresh Nova installation:

1. Create a MySQL database with utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation
2. Create a users table and emails table with user_id foreign key
3. Add subject (varchar) and body (mediumtext) fields to emails table with utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation
4. Create User and Email models with standard HasMany/BelongsTo relationships
5. Create Nova resources for User and Email
6. In User Nova resource, add: HasMany::make('Emails')
7. Insert email records with Arabic text in subject field
8. Visit individual email resource in Nova - works correctly
9. Visit user resource in Nova to view HasMany emails relationship - encoding error occurs
10. Verify json_encode(User::with('emails')->find($id)->toArray()) works in tinker/artisan command

[crynobone]

Unable to reproduce the issue, please provide full reproducing repository based on fresh installation as suggested in the bug report template (or you can refer to https://github.com/nova-issues for example)

[d-shannon]

Managed to isolate the issue. I was using a helper function to truncate the text which was not UTF-8 safe. It randomly caused the error.

Text::make('Subject')
->displayUsing(function ($value) use ($request) {
return ($request->isResourceIndexRequest()) ? truncate($value, 50) : $value;
}),

Switched to Str::limit($value, 50) resolved the issue.

Thanks!