Parsing JSON using php and curl command from an API - php

Question

I'm trying to parse the JSON information I get, using PHP, from a powershell script that uses a form on the web-page to send an API request that searches a test database and returns a set of clients and I want to eventually put these into a dynamically populated table.
The issue i'm having is that i'm not able to just print out a specified part of the JSON array onto the page
The JSON i'm getting looks like this:
[{
"id": 2,
"firstname": "Edward",
"lastname": "Franks",
"companyname": "",
"email": "EdwardFranks#mail.com",
"datecreated": "2018-10-09",
"groupid": 0,
"status": "Inactive"
},
{
"id": 1,
"firstname": "Frank",
"lastname": "Ti",
"companyname": "U Consultation",
"email": "frank#u.co.uk",
"datecreated": "2018-10-08",
"groupid": 0,
"status": "Active"
}]
We get this information by searching a name or an email address associated with the account.
HTML:
<form method ="post" action = "veeam.PHP">
<ul class="form-style-1">
<li>
<label>Name or Email <span class="required">*</span></label>
<input type="text" name="clientsearch" class="field-divided" placeholder="Enter details" />
<li>
<input type="submit" name="submit" onSubmit="invokeapi()"/>
</li>
</ul>
</form>
PHP:
function invokeapi() {
$client = $_POST["clientsearch"];
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';
$url = 'http://apiURL/?command=Check-ClientWHMCS%20'.$client;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_NTLM);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Length: 0'));
if (curl_errno($ch)) {
echo 'Error:' . curl_error($ch);
}
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$clientlist = (array) json_decode($output, true);
print_r($clientlist);
echo $clientlist[0]["id"];
}
if(isset($_POST['clientsearch'])) {
invokeapi();
}
When I use the json_last_error command it says there's no issue with the JSON and when I use the isArray command in PHP it says that the variable IS and array so i'm quite stuck on where to go next.
I get some output on the webpage but it just prints out the entirety of the JSON result on a single line with Array ([0] => 1) at the end of it.
Any help on this issue would be massively appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, now curl_exec() will print out the result immediatly instead of returning it as a string in other words $output will not be filled.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
Also your cast to an array with json_decode with true is not necessary.