API response not recognized as JSON

Question

I'm building an application based on a third party API that provides data in JSON format (or is supposed to).

Code snippet:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();



curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://api.test,com");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, FALSE);



curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);



curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(

  "Content-Type: application/json",

  "X-API-KEY: *",

  "X-API-SECRET: *"

));



$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);



var_dump($response);

The var_dump() command indicates that the $response variable is a string, and not a JSON.

I've ran through various stack exchange posts on how to clean up strings into JSON, stripslashes, remove invisible hex characters etc, but nothing seems to work.

When I paste this into a JSON validation tool, it says everything is ok.

2 questions:

Am I missing something in my code which causes this to be a string instead of a JSON? I've used APIs before and those just worked out of the box...

Since this is a third party API, a fix (if needed) to correct this situation will likely take long. Is there a script I can use to convert this string into JSON or an array object so that it becomes usable?

Thanks!

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Answer 1

Yep, always the HTTP responses are Strings. You have to explicitly typecast them:

$response = json_decode($response);
var_dump($response);

If you want this as an array instead of an object, set the second parameter as true.

$response = json_decode($response, true);
var_dump($response);

API response not recognized as JSON

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