CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjson
secondman
secondman

Reputation: 3277

json_decode fails to decode json data

In GitLab web hooks this is the json they give as an example.

{
  "before": "95790bf891e76fee5e1747ab589903a6a1f80f22",
  "after": "da1560886d4f094c3e6c9ef40349f7d38b5d27d7",
  "ref": "refs/heads/master",
  "user_id": 4,
  "user_name": "John Smith",
  "project_id": 15,
  "repository": {
    "name": "Diaspora",
    "url": "git@localhost:diaspora.git",
    "description": "",
    "homepage": "http://localhost/diaspora",
  },
  "commits": [
    {
      "id": "b6568db1bc1dcd7f8b4d5a946b0b91f9dacd7327",
      "message": "Update Catalan translation to e38cb41.",
      "timestamp": "2011-12-12T14:27:31+02:00",
      "url": "http://localhost/diaspora/commits/b6568db1bc1dcd7f8b4d5a946b0b91f9dacd7327",
      "author": {
        "name": "Jordi Mallach",
        "email": "[email protected]",
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "da1560886d4f094c3e6c9ef40349f7d38b5d27d7",
      "message": "fixed readme",
      "timestamp": "2012-01-03T23:36:29+02:00",
      "url": "http://localhost/diaspora/commits/da1560886d4f094c3e6c9ef40349f7d38b5d27d7",
      "author": {
        "name": "Code Solution dev user",
        "email": "gitlabdev@dv6700.(none)",
      },
    },
  ],
  "total_commits_count": 4,
}

I've placed this in a file test.json.

I'm calling this with file_get_contents() then trying to decode but I'm getting nothing back at all.

$test = file_get_contents('test.json');

$json = json_decode($test); 

echo "<pre>";
print_r($json);
echo "</pre>";

returns:

<pre></pre>

Any ideas why json_decode() is failing to decode?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 5696

Answers (2)

secondman
secondman

Reputation: 3277

Actually it wasn't stray commas as the answerers suggested, JSONLint reported BOM artifacts from UTF-8, I'm assuming from copying and pasting.

Once I ran it through and removed the BOM artifacts it decoded properly.

Thanks to all for your help and suggestions.

Upvotes: 0

Sverri M. Olsen
Sverri M. Olsen

Reputation: 13263

It is because of a stray comma. You should check for errors:

if (json_last_error() != JSON_ERROR_NONE) {
    die(json_last_error_msg());
}

If you have PHP <5.5.0 then you can use this compatibility function:

if ( ! function_exists('json_last_error_msg')) {
    function json_last_error_msg() {
        static $errors = array(
            JSON_ERROR_NONE             => null,
            JSON_ERROR_DEPTH            => 'Maximum stack depth exceeded',
            JSON_ERROR_STATE_MISMATCH   => 'Underflow or the modes mismatch',
            JSON_ERROR_CTRL_CHAR        => 'Unexpected control character found',
            JSON_ERROR_SYNTAX           => 'Syntax error, malformed JSON',
            JSON_ERROR_UTF8             => 'Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded'
        );
        $error = json_last_error();
        return array_key_exists($error, $errors) ? $errors[$error] : "Unknown error ({$error})";
    }
}

Upvotes: 2

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