Question

I am trying to parse the json output from

http://www.nyc.gov/portal/apps/311_contentapi/services/all.json

And my php json_decode returns a NULL

I am not sure where the issue is, I tried running a small subset of the data through JSONLint and it validated the json.

Any Ideas?

Answer 1

The error is in this section:

{
    "id":"2002-12-05-22-24-56_000010083df0188b4001eb56",
    "service_name":"Outdoor Electric System Complaint",
    "expiration":"2099-12-31T00:00:00Z",
    "brief_description":"Report faulty Con Edison equipment, including dangling or corroded power lines or "hot spots.""
}

See where it says “hot spots.” in an already quoted string. Those "‘s should’ve been escaped. Since you don’t have access to edit the JSON perhaps you could do a search for "hot spots."" and replace it with \"hot spots.\"" like str_replace('"hot spots.""', '\\"hot spots.\\""\, $str); for as long as that’s in there. Of course that only helps if this is a one time thing. If the site continues to make errors in their JSON output you’ll have to come up with something more complex.