Working with non-ASCII Characters in Laravel 5 Router

I have a router that uses a controller to fetch data from the database.

$router->get('/books/search/{query}', 'TextbookController@search');

When I get the data back and use non-ASCII characters in the URL, e.g.

$query = tést

public function search($query) { 
 dd($query);
}

The server returns t�st.

How can I get a response with the URL encoded correctly?

via Chebli Mohamed