Why is my JSON looking like this and what can I do about it?
I'm assuming you're talking about the presence of \u003Ca and similar...

It's like that because Json::encode uses the JSON_HEX_TAG/JSON_HEX_QUOT/etc flags. It's done to ensure that all strings in the document are RFC4627 compliant.

You shouldn't need to worry about this, any compliant parser will happily translate the hex back to the original characters.