The issue happens if there are some non-utf8 characters inside even though most of them are utf8 chars. This will remove any non-utf8 characters and now it works.
$data['name'] = mb_convert_encoding($data['name'], 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
The issue happens if there are some non-utf8 characters inside even though most of them are utf8 chars. This will remove any non-utf8 characters and now it works.
$data['name'] = mb_convert_encoding($data['name'], 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');