Convert JSON in print format to valid JSON - php

Question

I have a text file that is formatted like JSON, but in a print/view friendly format and I want to convert that string to valid JSON.
Basically, I want to read the file using PHP5 and call json_decode to deserialize the string.
But, json_decode is not able to parse the "print-friendly" json string.
I am getting error 4 Invalid or malformed JSON.
It looks like someone else had a similar issue as me: PHP json_decode() returns NULL with valid JSON?
I am using notepad++ to write the json file.
So, how can I convert
FROM:
{
"data": [
{
"thumbImg": "thumbImg",
"street": "street",
"city": "Fort Worth",
"state": "Texas",
"zip": "76192-0001",
"url": "url"
}
]
}
TO:
{"data":[{"thumbImg": "thumbImg", "street": "street", "city": "Fort Worth", "state": "Texas", "zip": "76192-0001", "url": "url"}]
I even tried doing the following:
<?php
$filename = "links.json";
$file = fopen($filename, "r");
$lines = file($filename);
$data = "";
;
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
$formatted = trim($line);
$formatted = str_replace("\r", "", $formatted);
$formatted = str_replace("\n", "", $formatted);
$data .= $formatted;
}
$json = json_decode($data, true);
?>
I did a var_dump of the resulting json string and http://jsonlint.com/ marked it as valid json; however, json_decode is not able to deserialize the json string for some reason.
Thank you!
SOLUTION
I set the encoding of the text file to UTF-8 without BOM and it works fine now. thank you all!

Answer 1

<?php
$filename = "links.json";
$file = file_get_contents($filename);
$json = json_decode($file, true);
?>
References:
- file_get_contents()
- json_decode()