PHP allow special characters from MySQL query column in Array

Question

Creating an array (which I want to encode to JSON) from a MySql select query, but one of the query columns has free text entered by users. I don't want special characters (or 'n/' formatting) in this column preventing the array from populating correctly. Not all rows are being displayed by the current statement and 'n/' etc characters are being included:

echo json_encode($data); //not sure this is in the right part of my code

I've used the below code successfully before but not in an array:

echo nl2br($row['MessageText'],ENT_COMPAT|ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8");

My PHP code:

if(!empty($_POST['msg']))
{

      $userid = session_id();
      $searchStr = get_post($con,'msg');
      $aKeyword = explode(" ", $searchStr);

      $aKeyword = array_filter($aKeyword); // Remove empty values

      $stmt = $con->prepare(

           'SELECT
              a.ID, a.MessageText, a.cntLikes, IFNULL(b.Type,0) as Type
            FROM
              (
                 SELECT m.ID, m.MessageText,count(l.Id) as cntLikes
                 FROM MessageMain m 
                 LEFT OUTER JOIN Likes l on m.ID = l.PostID 
                 WHERE MessageText REGEXP ?
                 GROUP BY m.ID, m.MessageText ORDER BY count(m.id) desc
              )a

            LEFT OUTER JOIN

             (
               SELECT postId, COUNT(*) as type 
               FROM likes 
               WHERE userid = ?
               GROUP BY postId
              )b

            on a.Id = b.PostId'
      );

      $regexString = implode('|', $aKeyword);
      $stmt->bind_param('ss',$regexString, $userId);
      $stmt->execute();
      $result = $stmt->get_result();

      $data = array();

     if(mysqli_num_rows($result) > 0) {
        While($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {   
          $data = $row;

          echo json_encode($data);
      }
    }
  }

Answer 1

What solved the issue was amending:

$data = $row;

to:

$data[] = array ( 'ID' => $row['ID'], 'UserID' => $row['UserID'], 'MessageText' => nl2br(htmlentities($row['MessageText'],ENT_COMPAT|ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8") ), 'cntLikes' => $row['cntLikes'], 'Type' => $row['Type'] );

The database column that was stopping the array from pulling back was 'MessageText'. This column had originally come from an Excel spreadsheet where the data was very dirty.

Using

nl2br(htmlentities($row['MessageText'],ENT_COMPAT|ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8"))

resolved the issue.