Having trouble to decode a JSON

Question

I guess there may be a hidden character inside.

JSON data:

The following response i am getting using this URL

{"request":{"command":"series","series_id":"ng.n3010us3.a"},"data":{"error":"No api_key. For key registration, documentation, and examples see http://www.eia.gov/developer/"}}

What I did:

Use file_get_contents fetch the data from the URL
use json_decode($rawjson,TRUE); to make it as an array. -> ERROR

the json_last_error_message shows 'Syntax Error'

I'm trying to find which character is causing the problem.

Cannot duplicate. Are you certain that's the data that your script is processing? — Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, Oct 19 '15 at 04:38
http://jsonlint.com/ indicates your JSON is perfect. Tried using json_decode and that works wonderfully well. Include your code here and in your code, right before `json_decode($rawjson, true);`, do `echo $rawjson;` and include whatever is echoed out in your post as well. — zedfoxus, Oct 19 '15 at 04:41
@zedfoxus echo $rawjson; shows exactly the same. If you copy and paste my data, there wont be any problem with the decode. But when use file_get_contents, json_decode won't work — Shiji.J, Oct 19 '15 at 14:43
Look at the very nice solution provided by Alex. Byte order mark sequence is received along with the JSON when you do file_get_contents. That's why you are having troubles. Alex's solution will get you going. If you continue to have troubles, feel free to post a comment — zedfoxus, Oct 19 '15 at 15:10

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

As mentioned earlier, the response includes a BOM sequence.
See here more about byte-order-mark.

You can remove it like so:

$j = file_get_contents("http://api.eia.gov/series/?api_key=&series_id=NG.N3010US3.A");

$o = json_decode(remove_bom($j));

var_dump($o);


function remove_bom($string)
{
    $bom = pack('H*','EFBBBF');
    $text = preg_replace("/^$bom/", '', $text);
    return $sring;
}

Having trouble to decode a JSON

1 Answers1