CakePHP debug() isn't working but Debugger::dump() is fine

Question

Ever since PHP4 and Cake 1.3 I have been using debug($data); to debug things such as model output in CakePHP.

However, since upgrading to PHP5.4, I have

Answer 1

This can happen with non-utf8 encoded data in your db records - if the rest of your application is UTF-8 that is. debug() will then just output "nothing". var_dump(), print_r() and other php internal methods should still print the output, though.

You can usually re-encode them to utf8 using iconv() etc.