yiisoft/yii2 — pull request #999 by iJackUA (2013-10-17 12:36:45+00:00)
Title: Fixes #933 Debug panel : change json_encode/decode to serialise/unserialise

To prevent non-UTF characters error
I am not sure as for
> htmlspecialchars(var_export($value, true), ENT_QUOTES|ENT_SUBSTITUTE, \Yii::$app->charset, TRUE)
but it seems like an overkill to create a separate encode function for single use