How to get external JSON with PHP that has content-type text/plain?

Question

I am trying to fetch an external JSON response with my PHP back-end But my problem is that the external endpoint is returned as the Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8, and that only gives me gibberish when I read it.

string '����������ݒ�J�� ... etc...

Is there a way to encode that response?

This is what I have done:

$response = file_get_contents('external_url');

I have also tried this:

$json = json_decode(file_get_contents('external_url'), true);

Any errors on processing the result? If you only display the data, have you set the document to utf-8? header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8'); — Christian Gollhardt
– Christian Gollhardt, Commented Aug 31, 2015 at 7:09
If I use the json_decode I get null and if I set the header above there is no difference. — KungWaz
– KungWaz, Commented Aug 31, 2015 at 7:18

deceze · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-31 07:09:57Z

3

It doesn't really matter to PHP what Content-Type the response declares, it doesn't do anything with that information. You're getting exactly the same response body whether the header says text/plain or JSON.

More likely the response is compressed and you need to uncompress it with gzinflate or such.

answered Aug 31, 2015 at 7:09

deceze♦

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3 Comments

KungWaz Over a year ago

If I do that I only get an error... "gzinflate(): data error" These are the content types from the orginal response: Content-Encoding:gzip Content-Length:344662 Content-Type:text/plain;charset=utf-8

KungWaz Over a year ago

Ok, I can set you as the correct answer, since you really pointed me in the right direction, I had to use readgzfile. If you want you can edit that in to your answer :)

deceze Over a year ago

If you have to use readgzfile that means you're storing the content in a file... which is quite different usage than gzinflate...?! Anyway, the manual page of gzinflate I link to links to the other functions, and I explicitly left it up to you to figure out precisely which one is the appropriate one...

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