Special character and setState

Hi,

I implemented an UserIdentity class to capture the information in headers.

I use setPersistentStates() to store all the user information pulled out from DB but I’ve encountered one question:

I have a user profile with the name "Emily♥", which containing a special character.

I’ve printed out the $_SESSION and found out this is the cause that the variables are not properly stored in my session.

However, I can access the variable after I unset the "name" column.

Can anyone tell me why is this will be the case? I was using CakePHP and didn’t have any issue like this when dealing with session.

My app/db/view encoding are all set to UTF-8.

What should I do to maintain the name in my session without unsetting it?

Thank you!