Laravel JSON maxCDN / Chrome JSON Formatter does not work - php

Question

Currently i am working with Laravel and the maxcdn API.
This is my very little test code
Route::get('cdn', function() {
$api = new MaxCDN("myurl","mykey","mysecret");
$data = $api->get('/account.json');
return response()->json($data);
});
The header is set to json as you see
application/json
Now if i visit my /cdn url the Chrome JSON Formatter should be of course formate the output. But it does not work, i only get this output
"{\"code\":200,\"data\":{\"account\":{\"id\":\"12312\",\"name\":\"My Name \",\"alias\":\"myurl\",\"date_created\":\"2015-05-17 07:51:50\",\"date_updated\":\"0000-00-00 ........
I am working on my homestead machine
php -v
PHP 5.6.6-1+deb.sury.org~utopic+1 (cli) (built: Feb 20 2015 11:25:37)
Copyright (c) 1997-2015 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2015 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.4-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2015, by Zend Technologies
with Xdebug v2.2.5, Copyright (c) 2002-2014, by Derick Rethans

Answer 1

The $api->get('/account.json'); call returns a string that contains the json data. You are then passing this string to the response()->json(); method, and that is the output you are seeing.
You need to run the string through json_decode() in order to convert the json string into a PHP object. Once you do that, you can pass that result to the response()->json(); method, and you will get the result you're looking for.
Route::get('cdn', function() {
$api = new MaxCDN("myurl","mykey","mysecret");
$stringData = $api->get('/account.json');
// convert the json string into an actual PHP object
$data = json_decode($stringData);
// respond with the object
return response()->json($data);
});