json - Problem with json_decode PHP

Question

I'm receiving a json array from python as the return of curl_exec in PHP (first json PHP -> python, that returns another json), and decode fails due to bad syntax. The json received is valid, but somehow if I cast this json to string and prints it I get a string with 29 characters, but if I print strlen((string)$my_json) it says 50.

Here's the code:

$results = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
var_dump(json_decode($results));

And that returns NULL. If I do the following

echo (string)$results;

It prints [[11, "stuffstuf", "stuffs"]] (29 chars), which is a valid json. But if I do

echo strlen((string)$results);

It prints 50.

So, I don't know what is going on. Any thoughts would be appreciated =)

Answer 1

Could it be that you have some html tags around it that you don't see when doing the simple echo?

Try: echo htmlentities((string)$results); to see more, or check the html source of the page.

If json_decode() fails, it means the string isn't standard JSON.

You can also use json_last_error_msg() to figure out why it returned NULL. That will return an error message if there was any error in json_decode.