Malformed UTF-8 Data in JSON

PHP Users, I'm decoding some JSON data in PHP to convert it into an array. However, it's not working, and json_last_error() is returning a value of "4", which I believe means "Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded". I try at every turn in every setting to ensure that all my code and connections are in UTF-8. But how can I be sure it's valid UTF-8? I've tried using the PHP command utf8_encode() on the string, but that hasn't changed anything. And can I trust the error message? Any help or advice would be much appreciated. By the way, here is the code I'm currently testing with. I'm just encoding and then decoding a string right in the PHP just to get it to work before I even try getting the data from anywhere else. $myData ='{"display_name":"Test Guy","email":"testguy@testaddress.com","timeout":"1279145273"}'; $myArray1 = json_encode($myData); $myArray2 = utf8_encode (stripslashes($myArray1)); $myArray = json_decode($myArray2, true); $jsonerror = json_last_error(); -- Dave M G