Question

I’m having problem with CURL from a link. I’m able to get an output with file_get_contents(); But having problems with CURL

use json_decode I get a NULL with cURL, but with file_get_contents() I get an Array

Using cURL

$url="https://example.com/" 
$ch= curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
$json= json_decode(curl_exec($ch),true); 
echo $json; //outputs NULL

Using file_get_contents();

$json_pi = file_get_contents($url); 
echo json_decode($json_pi,true);

Can anyone help me understand cURL? And why I might be getting these two conflicting results?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You are not doing any error checking after your calls, so if something goes wrong, you will never hear about it.

• Check the result of the CURL call using curl_error()

• Check the result of the json_encode() call using json_last_error() (PHP >= 5.3)

one of these will probably reveal what the problem is. For example, it could be that the curl call fetches the data in a non-UTF-8 character set, which will cause json_decode() to break – it expects UTF-8 data at all times.