I love Laravel. Simple, elegant, easy, well documentated. However, sometimes the errors are not always very clear. Certainly when having issues while using ajax. Because when the system is unable to produce a slick stacktrace through the request, you will need to view the Laravel logs in BASE_PATH/storage/logs .

The Exception

In my case, I had some issues with the Mail function of Laravel. This is what I found ion my logs:

Next exception 'ErrorException' with message 'htmlentities() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given (View: BASE_BATH/resources/views/emails/contact.blade.php)' in BASE_BATH/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Support/helpers.php:469

So, somewhere in my blade view which I use for a contact message, a string, or rather, an unwanted object, is being parsed resulting in the following error:

Next exception 'ErrorException' with message 'htmlentities() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given

My code

But when checking, everything seems fine. To give an indication of what I used, check the code below:

<ul>
    <li><strong>Name:</strong> {{ $name }}</li>
    <li><strong>E-mail:</strong> {{ $email }}</li>
    <li><strong>Company:</strong> {{ $company }}</li>
    <li><strong>Phonenumber:</strong> {{ $phonenumber }}</li>
    <li><strong>IP:</strong> {{ $ip }}</li>
</ul>
<h2>Message:</h2>
<p>{{ $message }}</p>

As you might guess, everything seems fine, right? Well, obviously not, but why?

Solution

The solution is quite simple but rather silly. It is even partly mentioned as a warning at the Laravel Mail documentation:

Note: A $message variable is always passed to e-mail views, and allows the inline embedding of attachments. So, it is best to avoid passing a message variable in your view payload.

So of course the View cannot comprehend and escape $message . It isn’t the message YOU have passed to the view, it is the message instance used by Laravel.

Simply rename $message to $text and everything should work perfectly fine again!