Are there any alternatives to json_decode? - php

Question

I have a JSON string that passes the checks in http://www.freeformatter.com/json-validator.html, which returns:
The JSON input is valid in JavaScript.
The JSON input is valid according to RFC 4627 (JSON specfication).
However, when I run:
$string = json_decode($string);
print_r($string);
It prints the string exactly the same way it was before the json_decode($string).
Is there something else I can try? Or maybe something I don't know or didn't think about?
The string is here: http://pubapi.cryptsy.com/api.php?method=marketdatav2
To get the string, I was using:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://pubapi.cryptsy.com/api.php?method=marketdatav2");
$ret = curl_exec($ch);
and then
$ret = substr($ret, 0,-1);
As it returned a 1 at the end, although I had originally tried it without removing the last character and got the same result.

Answer 1

$s = file_get_contents("http://pubapi.cryptsy.com/api.php?method=marketdatav2");
$s = json_decode($s);
print_r($s);
works like a charm
here is my curl version
$url = "http://pubapi.cryptsy.com/api.php?method=marketdatav2";
$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HEADER,0);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1);
$data=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$s = json_decode($data);
print_r($s);

Answer 2

It looks like that page is being served as windows-1252, but I believe JSON must be in UTF-8. Try converting it to UTF-8 first, and then run it through json_decode().