Cannot Decode JSON API response - php

Question

I have built an API for my shipping quote system. I feed it values and I get rate quotes back. It works fine but I cannot decode the JSON response. I get a NULL response and I'm not sure whats up. According to validaters the JSON is correct.
So what I essentially do is encode a PHP array on one side and I want to parse that on the other side using a browser and PHP. However, I get a NULL response.
Here is the JSON. Let me know if you need more.
{"carrier":"R&L Carriers","charge":"99.13","service_days":"Wednesday Oct. 22, 2014"}
I just want to decode this so I can parse it. If there is another way to parse please let me know.
Also, I searched SOF and the similar issues people were having here didn't help me.
This is the code I use to generate the JSON.
<?php
//include ('mysql_connect.php');
$result = mysql_query('select * from quote where user_id = "'.$user_id.'" order by netCharge asc limit 1');
if (!$result) {
die('Could not query:' . mysql_error());
}
if (!$result) echo mysql_error();
$api_data = array();
$api_count = '0';
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
$api_data[carrier] = $row['carrier'];
$api_data[charge] = $row['netCharge'];
$api_data[service_days] = $row['serviceDays'];
$api_count++;
}
$api_data = json_encode($api_data);
print_r($api_data);
?>
This is what I'm using to grab that JSON data:
<?php
$input = file_get_contents('api_request.php?dest_zip=66101&weight=200&class=50&ltl_shipment=X&Residential_Delivery=X');
echo $input;
$obj = json_decode($input);
var_dump($obj);
?>

Answer 1

Have you tried the following
$array = json_decode($data, true);

Answer 2

Your response has an extra </div> in it.
Delete the div so that's valid JSON and the decode function will work.
http://trumrates.com/trumrates/rate/quote/signin/api_request.php?dest_zip=66101&weight=200&class=50&ltl_shipment=X&Residential_Delivery=X
Yields:
{"carrier":"R&L Carriers","charge":"99.13","service_days":"Wednesday Oct. 22, 2014"}
</div>

Answer 3

Summary
The built-in function json_decode (see doc) should help. According to the official document, NULL is returned if the JSON cannot be decoded or if the encoded data is deeper than the recursion limit.
I doubt the JSON string you read is actually NOT as same as PHP reads. Please make sure the string is NOT HTML escaped. And it is very important that keys and values in a JSON should be quoted by double quote. Single quote is malformed JSON, which might be considered as syntax error.
Example
To be a good demo, I put json string in file and then decode it using test.php.
In example.json:
{"carrier":"R&L Carriers","charge":"99.13","service_days":"Wednesday Oct. 22, 2014"}
In test.php:
<?php
$input = file_get_contents('example.json');
echo $input;
// {"carrier":"R&L Carriers","charge":"99.13","service_days":"Wednesday Oct. 22, 2014"}
$obj = json_decode($input);
var_dump($obj);
// object(stdClass)#1 (3) {
// ["carrier"]=>
// string(12) "R&L Carriers"
// ["charge"]=>
// string(5) "99.13"
// ["service_days"]=>
// string(23) "Wednesday Oct. 22, 2014"
// }

Answer 4

When I wrote the code I used 'Enter' to give me spaces between lines of code. For some reason that translated to the JSON and that's why it wasn't working. I just deleted all the extra empty lines in my file and it worked.