PHP cURL response issue - php

Question

I'm using the below curl request which returns a XML structured response. The response however seems wrong (first line: string(744978) "<?xml etc). I normally json_decode it, however that does not seem to work. Is this an issue in the endpoint or am I doing something wrong? I would like to convert the response to an array so I can store it in a database.
REQUEST
$url = 'url';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
RESPONSE

Answer 1

use this function for result like
$url = 'url';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$result = api_result($result);
curl_close($ch);
function api_result($result){
$plainXML = $this->mungXML($result);
$arrayResult = json_decode(json_encode(SimpleXML_Load_String($plainXML, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA)), true);
return $arrayResult;
}
<!-- begin snippet: js hide: false console: true babel: false -->

Answer 2

function xml_to_json_feed() {
$url = 'http://x';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($result);
$json = json_encode($xml);
$array = json_decode($json,TRUE);
curl_close($ch);
return $array;
}