diff --git a/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb b/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb
index f0c87048..ff8337b6 100755
--- a/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb
+++ b/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb
@@ -154,14 +154,7 @@ sub gdbmi_to_hash($text, $makejson = 1) {
     $text =~ s/\\+(\d{3})/$1 >= 0x20 ? chr oct $1 : "\\\\$1"/ge;
 
     # escape malformed unicode
-    my $octets;
-
-    while (1) {
-        $octets .= decode('UTF-8', $text, Encode::FB_QUIET);
-        last if not length $text;
-        $text =~ s/(.)/sprintf '\\\\x%X', ord $1/e;
-    }
-
+    my $octets = decode('UTF-8', $text, sub { sprintf '\\\\x%X', shift });
     $text = encode('UTF-8', $octets, Encode::FB_CROAK);
 
     # escape invalid JSON characters
diff --git a/lib/PBot/VERSION.pm b/lib/PBot/VERSION.pm
index 2fc7c131..2f39064e 100644
--- a/lib/PBot/VERSION.pm
+++ b/lib/PBot/VERSION.pm
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ use PBot::Imports;
 # These are set by the /misc/update_version script
 use constant {
     BUILD_NAME     => "PBot",
-    BUILD_REVISION => 4524,
+    BUILD_REVISION => 4525,
     BUILD_DATE     => "2022-04-04",
 };