Accessing Laravel Rest API with curl - JSON

Question

I'm trying to get my client to work with my API but I'm having some trouble, i'm new to cURL so maybe you can help me.

My API controller (laravel.project/api/v1/users/{id}

public function show($user)
    {

       if ($user == null)
            return $this->setStatusCode(404)->respondNotFound('User not found');

        return $this->respond($user);
    }

This is the answer I get by making a simple request with POSTMAN

{
    "data": {
        "id": 4,
        "name": "Helena",
        "email": "hh@gmail.com",
        "created_at": "2015-03-26 21:13:16",
        "updated_at": "2015-03-26 21:13:16"
    }
}


Response Headers:

Cache-Control → no-cache
Connection → keep-alive
Content-Type → application/json
Date → Sat, 28 Mar 2015 15:44:45 GMT
Server → nginx/1.6.2
Transfer-Encoding → chunked

Everything fine till now, but then, when I use cURL in my client this way:

public function delete($url, $token)
    {

        $final_url = $this->base_url . $url;

        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $final_url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'DELETE');
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Authorization: Bearer ' . $token, 'Content-Type: application/json'));

        $result = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);

        return $result;
    }

The response I get is not a json:

"{
  "data":{
    "id":4,
    "name":"Helena",
    "email":"hh@gmail.com",
    "created_at":"2015-03-26 21:13:16",
    "updated_at":"2015-03-26 21:13:16"}
}"

It looks like a json response but notice the quotes at the begging and at the end, I can't parse it neither with json_encode or json_decode.

I've been struggling with this for a while any opinion are apreciated.

Just to make sure you understand my problem, code is working well, but when making the request with curl it doesn't use the content-type header

EDIT 1:

{#165
  +"data": {#167
    +"id": 4
    +"name": "Helena"
    +"email": "hh@gmail.com"
    +"created_at": "2015-03-26 21:13:16"
    +"updated_at": "2015-03-26 21:13:16"
  }
}

Answer 1

Instead of return $result, try:

return response()->json(json_decode($result));