title: Status Code: 500 Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded Laravel
body: <p>I get that error everytime I try to create a post request in Postman with a controller, I think that it is this Model that is causing the problem. What can I do to fix the error? I think that the json_decode is causing the problem. please help me. thank you</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php
  
  namespace App;
  
  use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;
  
  class Group extends BaseModel
  {
      use SoftDeletes;
  
      /**
       * The connection name for the model.
       *
       * @var string
       */
      protected $connection = 'mysql-core';
  
      /**
       * The attributes that should be mutated to dates.
       *
       * @var array
       */
      protected $dates = [
          'created_at',
          'updated_at',
          'deleted_at'
      ];
  
      /**
       * The attributes that are mass assignable.
       *
       * @var array
       */
      protected $fillable = [
          'uuid',
          'organization_id',
          'name',
          'description',
          'allowed_members',
      ];
  
      public function setAllowedMembersAttribute($value)
      {
          if (empty($value)) {
              $value = [];
          }
  
          $this-&gt;attributes['allowed_members'] = json_encode($value, JSON_HEX_QUOT | JSON_HEX_TAG);
      }
  
      public function getAllowedMembersAttribute($value)
      {
          if ($value === null) {
              return [];
          }
  
          return json_decode($value);
      }
  }
  </code></pre>