Laravel View::render() gives error - laravel

Question

I'm trying to render a view with čćžšđ letters in it, but it's failing and giving me this error:
The Response content must be a string or object implementing __toString(), \"boolean\" given."
I extracted a partial, and when I load this partial using normal way (with #include) then everything is ok.
But I need "load more" function, so I'm using this partial to render html for me, and I only append it to DOM using jQuery.
This is the partial:
<?php $flag = true; ?>
#foreach($tags as $tag)
#if(empty($tag->tag)) <?php continue; ?> #endif
#if($flag == true)
<?php $temp = $tag->tag[0]; ?>
<br><label class="firstLetterLabel">{{ strtoupper($temp) }}</label><br><hr><br>
<?php $flag = false; ?>
#endif
#if($temp != $tag->tag[0])
<br><label class="firstLetterLabel">{{ strtoupper($tag->tag[0]) }}</label><br><hr><br>
#endif
<div class="singleTag">
{{ $tag->tag }}
</div>
<?php $temp = $tag->tag[0]; ?>
#endforeach
This is how I use it in "load more" function:
$tags = Tag::orderBy("tag")->take(Config::get("settings.num_tags_per_page"))->skip(($page-1)*Config::get("settings.num_tags_per_page"))->get();
$data = array();
$data['data'] = View::make("discover.partials.tags")->with("tags", $tags)->render();
if(count($tags)%Config::get("settings.num_tags_per_page") == 0 && count($tags) > 0)
$data['msg'] = 'ok';
else
$data['msg'] = 'stop';
return json_encode($data);
This partial read tags and sort them alphabetically, and it extracts first letter of every tag because I need that letter somewhere else.
And when this partial finds one of these letters čćžšđ then it gives me above error.
How to solve this?

Answer 1

Try this:
json_encode($output, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE)

Answer 2

For future notice, I solved this problem by replacing $tag->tag[0] with mb_substr($tag->tag, 0, 1). This command extracts utf-8 characters from string while my previous approach wasn't properly encoding utf-8 chars.
More info here: Get first character of UTF-8 string