Question

I have a .json file with this content:

{ "questions": "reponse" }

And I would like parse the content of the file into a PHP array but I have a strange issue…

$path = 'myFile.json';
echo file_get_contents($path); 
echo var_dump(json_decode(file_get_contents($path), true));
echo var_dump(json_decode(utf8_encode(file_get_contents($path), true)));
$json = '{ "questions": "reponse" }';
echo var_dump(json_decode($json, true));

And the result on my screen is:

{ "questions": "reponse" }
null
null
array (size=1)
  'questions' => string 'reponse' (length=7)

What’s the difference between the string from the file and the string in my program?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Try run this code:

var_dump(json_decode(trim(file_get_contents($path)), true));

I expect that there are some whitespaces (like a BOM/UTF-8 header) which make trouble.