Extra value 1 is appending with curl response - php

Question

From following two files I am getting output (2000)1 but It should only (2000)
After getting value using curl extra 1 is appending, but why?
balance.php
<?php
$url = "http://localhost/sms/app/user_balance.php";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, 2);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "id=2&status=Y");
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;
?>
user_balance.php
<?php
$conn = mysql_connect("localhost","root","");
mysql_select_db("sms",$conn);
$user_id = $_REQUEST["id"];
$sql = "SELECT * FROM user_sms WHERE user_id='$user_id'";
$rec = mysql_query($sql);
if($row = mysql_fetch_array($rec)) {
$balance = $row["user_sms_balance"];
}
echo "(".$balance.")";
?>

Answer 1

From the PHP manual documentation for curl_setopt():
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER - Set value to TRUE to return the transfer as a string of the return value of curl_exec() instead of outputting it out directly.
If you don't set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option to TRUE , then the return value from curl_exec() will be the boolean value of the operation -- 1 or 0. To avoid it, you can set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to TRUE, like below:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

Answer 2

I can see that last response to this question was made back in 2017....
I have bashed my head around for past day and I finally got the results that I wanted. I had the same problem as the author of this question.
Maybe my solution will help others and if do help please vote it I would appreciate it.
So in my case I have build the plugin and using shortcode and cURL API get I am feeding API data into the shortcode output.
Anyway I had this working but also printing the Extra value , which is the true value from the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER.
I have solved this by passing ob_start() and ob_get_clean() inside of my shortcode function. This has cleaned and return the response that I wanted without the Extra value 1 appending at the end of my data response.
My shortcode function looks like this
function shortcode_init(){
ob_start();
include PLUGIN_URL . 'templates/shortcode.php';
return ob_get_clean();
}
As you can see I am including the additional php where my cURL API call is defined.
In case someone needs this..here you go.
$ch = curl_init();
$url = YOUR API END POINT URL HERE;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$err = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if ($err) {
echo $err;
} else {
// this returns the array from object
// then we can easily iterate thought arrays and echo values that we need,
$decoded = json_decode($response, true);
}