diff --git a/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb b/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb
index a3ae00fc..5b9584b6 100755
--- a/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb
+++ b/applets/pbot-vm/guest/bin/guest-gdb
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ no warnings qw(experimental::signatures);
 use IPC::Open2;
 use JSON::XS;
 use Data::Dumper;
+use Encode qw(decode encode);
 
 # set debug flag from DEBUG env or here
 my $debug = $ENV{DEBUG} // 0;
@@ -152,6 +153,13 @@ sub gdbmi_to_hash($text, $makejson = 1) {
     # when and why the backslashes double up)
     $text =~ s/\\+(\d{3})/$1 >= 0x20 ? chr oct $1 : "\\\\$1"/ge;
 
+    # fix unicode
+    my $octets = decode('UTF-8', $text, Encode::FB_DEFAULT);
+    $text = encode('UTF-8', $octets, Encode::FB_CROAK);
+
+    # escape invalid JSON characters
+    $text =~ s/([\x10-\x1f])/sprintf '\\\\x{%x}', ord $1/ge;
+
     # return hashtable decoded from json
     return decode_json("{$text}");
 }
diff --git a/lib/PBot/VERSION.pm b/lib/PBot/VERSION.pm
index 04fb2fe7..d4d3f229 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 => 4521,
+    BUILD_REVISION => 4523,
     BUILD_DATE     => "2022-04-04",
 };