CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjson
Tim
Tim

Reputation: 5

Json decode comes up as NULL

#input url
$url = 'http://www.example.com';

#get the data
$json = file_get_contents($url);
$contents = utf8_encode($json); 

#convert to php array
$php_array = json_decode($json);
var_dump($php_array); 
exit;

I'm trying to decode a website but once I decode it my page comes up as NULL, does anyone know how I can fix it? Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 92

Answers (2)

devpro
devpro

Reputation: 16117

You can use CURL request here:

Example:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.example.com'; // your url
$ch = curl_init(); // initiate
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url); // curl url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$result = curl_exec($ch); // curl output
$php_array = json_decode($result,true);
var_dump($php_array); 
?>

Output:

array(3) { ["timestamp"]=> string(8) "10:38:38" ["error_num"]=> int(404) ["error_msg"]=> string(20) "File Not Found Error" }

CURL give you more options to fetch remote content and error checking than to file_get_content.

Upvotes: 0

Thamaraiselvam
Thamaraiselvam

Reputation: 7080

In your case http://www.example.com this URL returns 404 error. so file_get_contents($url) get null value.

$url = 'http://www.example.com';
$json = file_get_contents($url); // HTTP 404
echo $json; //returns null

This works fine

<?php

$url = 'http://www.example.com';
// create curl resource
$ch = curl_init();

// set url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

//return the transfer as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// $output contains the output string
$output = curl_exec($ch);

// close curl resource to free up system resources
curl_close($ch);

$php_array = json_decode($output, true); // true for returning to an array

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

Extra Tip: I too faced null issue sometimes. You could ask json_last_error() to get definite information.

Upvotes: 2

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