GoToTraining API rejecting json? - php

Question

OK, I'm using the GoToTraining API to try to create a new Training. The docs say to "post" JSON to the endpoint.
So I have my array of data in PHP (this is a WordPress site, and here I'm grabbing stuff from Advanced Custom Fields data)
$my_data_array = array(
'name' => get_the_title( $_POST['acf']['field_5ab508b853122'] ),
'description' => $_POST['acf']['field_5ab50b2406457'],
'timeZone' => 'America/Los_Angeles',
'times' => array(
array(
'startDate' => date( 'Y-m-d', strtotime( $_POST['acf']['field_5ab50908347ef'] ) ) . 'T' . $_POST['acf']['field_5ab50bc6af8df'] . 'Z',
'endDate' => date( 'Y-m-d', strtotime( $_POST['acf']['field_5ab50908347ef'] ) ) . 'T' . $_POST['acf']['field_5abbd96c6ff8d'] . 'Z',
),
),
'registrationSettings' => array(
'disableConfirmationEmail' => false,
'disableWebRegistration' => true,
)
);
and then I'm just doing:
$payload = json_encode( $my_data_array )
to create the payload, which looks like this, if I print_r the value of $payload:
{"name":"Today’s Class","description":"We can add some default content here","timeZone":"America\/Los_Angeles","times":[{"startDate":"2018-04-24T06:00:00Z","endDate":"2018-04-24T09:00:00Z"}],"registrationSettings":{"disableConfirmationEmail":false,"disableWebRegistration":true}}
If I make the curl request, posting $payload, I get back:
Array
(
[errorCode] => InternalError
[description] => We have encountered an internal error. The request may
be retried, but it may have the same result.
[incident] => 5102160953111715072
)
Could be lots of things, right? But here is thing that's driving me crazy:
If cut and paste that dumped value of $payload above into the "body" field in the sandbox thing on the API reference page (see the link above), it works fine and I get an ID for the new Training back as the response.
Moreover, if I cut and paste that same string and just hardcode it as a string value of my $payload variable in my script (using the exact same code for the curl stuff) -- only difference being I'm hardcoding the value of $payload, like this
$payload = '{"name":"Today’s Class","description":"We can add some default content here","timeZone":"America\/Los_Angeles","times":[{"startDate":"2018-04-24T06:00:00Z","endDate":"2018-04-24T09:00:00Z"}],"registrationSettings":{"disableConfirmationEmail":false,"disableWebRegistration":true}}';
... and make the request that way, it also works and gives me a successful response!
protected function make_request( $url, $method, $fields ) {
// $payload = json_encode( $fields );
$payload = '{"name":"Getting to Know Today’s Electric Utility Industry","description":"We can add some default content here","timeZone":"America\/Los_Angeles","times":[{"startDate":"2018-04-24T06:00:00Z","endDate":"2018-04-24T09:00:00Z"}],"registrationSettings":{"disableConfirmationEmail":false,"disableWebRegistration":true}}';
$http_headers = array(
'Accept: application/json',
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Authorization: OAuth oauth_token=' . $this->access_token,
);
$ch = curl_init();
if ( 'post' == $method ) {
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payload ); // define what you want to post
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true ); // return the output in string format
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $http_headers );
}
$response = curl_exec( $ch );
curl_close( $ch ); // close curl handle
return $response;
}
But what's assigned to $payload here is exactly the same thing I'm getting if I print_r what json_encode() returns. Whaa??
I do notice, if I run
mb_detect_encoding( $payload );
I get 'ASCII' from the json_encode version and I get 'UTF-8' on the version where I hardcode the string as the value of the variable. Would that make any difference?
Am I missing something simple? Anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong here? Been beating my head against the wall for too many hours.

Answer 1

So for posterity: Turns out that apostrophe in the name of the Training was causing GTT to choke on the data getting sent over. But it had something to do with the get_the_title() function, which handles apostrophes and quotes differently than just grabbing the value from $post->post_title. When I changed the code that was assembling the data for the API call to $post->post_title instead of get_the_title(), it worked.