error for specific items

yes a duplicate. I doubt that to be honest. The issue seems to appear only with a few specific products. please see the log here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11X9rw27RFlU4tDzy-8T3HcP330aNxrLj/view?usp=sharing

I tested it with plugins deactivated and standard theme. Still happens. Have you checked the log? My ai says that according to the log the product name is empty in the request. But the product has a name. I cant find any solution for this. Customers message me that it happens to them and they cant order.

after more digging:  



You are getting the error because your PayPal API call is passing a “boolean” value (true/false) to a place where it expects either an array or a string.

When looking at your order details, most of the data looks correct:

The payer name and email are fine, shipping details are there, products are listed.

But there is something suspicious in the product list:

One of your products has a corrupted name. Specifically, the second product ends with this:

“Anime Tomoe Cosplay Perücke Silber Weiß 100cm Lang Gerade Hitzebeständige Synthetische Haar Halloween Anime Perücken + Per�”

The strange character at the end (“�”) means there is a broken or invalid character encoding.

This is likely coming from the product title in your database or from how the title was saved.

What happens is:

• When your system tries to prepare the data for PayPal, it runs json_encode() to convert the data to JSON.

• If there’s a broken character like this, json_encode() fails and returns “false”.

• When this “false” is sent to the PayPal API, the system throws an error because it expected a proper array or string, not a boolean value.

That’s why you get this error.

So

could this be the reason? can I add a code snippet so such things do not cause the JSON to get broken?

Do you think sth like this works:

// Clean up product names and descriptions before PayPal order creation
add_filter(‘woocommerce_paypal_payments_create_order_request’, function($request, $order) {
// Safety check
if (empty($request[‘purchase_units’][0][‘items’])) {
return $request;
}

// Loop through all items in the request
foreach ($request['purchase_units'][0]['items'] as &$item) {
    if (!empty($item['name'])) {
        $item['name'] = clean_utf8_string($item['name']);
    }
    if (!empty($item['description'])) {
        $item['description'] = clean_utf8_string($item['description']);
    }
}

return $request;

}, 10, 2);

// Helper function to clean UTF-8 strings
function clean_utf8_string($string) {
// Convert to UTF-8 and remove invalid characters
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, ‘UTF-8’, ‘UTF-8’);
// Optionally strip other problematic characters
$string = preg_replace(‘/[^\P{C}]+/u’, ”, $string); // Remove control characters
return $string;
}

still the reason is somehow the product name

Your PayPal order fails because the product in the order is missing the “name” field.

When you send data to PayPal, every product in the order needs:

• A name

• A quantity

• A price (unit amount)

In your current order, the product has:

• Quantity ✅

• Price ✅

• But no name ❌

Because the “name” is missing, your system tries to prepare the data for PayPal, but when it converts the data to JSON, it fails and returns “false”.

When this “false” is sent to PayPal, the error happens:

Argument #3 ($data) must be of type array|string, boolean given

maybe the most simple solution is to not send the product name to PayPal?