Json_decode not working in Flickr API

Question

I have this code

$feed_Flickr = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=44545397@N03&lang=en-us&format=json';
    $Flickr = file_get_contents($feed_Flickr);
    $Flickr = str_replace('jsonFlickrFeed(','',$Flickr);
    $Flickr = str_replace('})','}',$Flickr);
    $flickrvalue = json_decode($Flickr);
    print_r($flickrvalue);

print_r return nothing what's the wrong with code?

Answer 1

The data isn't valid JSON and that's why json_decode() isn't working. You can try validating it with a website such as jsonlint.com.

From the json_decode() documentation:

NULL is returned if the json cannot be decoded or if the encoded data is deeper than the recursion limit.

That explains why you're not getting any outputs.

UPDATE:

It turns out Flickr escapes single quotes (') and apparently this isn't allowed and makes the JSON invalid. You can use str_replace() to get around this:

$flickrResponse = str_replace("\\'", "'", $Flickr);

Also, as the Flickr API documentation says, instead of using the normal JSON, you can get the raw JSON by appending the nojsoncallback parameter with the value of 1 to the URL, like so:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=44545397@N03&lang=en-us&format=json&nojsoncallback=1

So, with that changes, our code should be working:

$feed_Flickr = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=44545397@N03&lang=en-us&format=json&nojsoncallback=1';
$Flickr = file_get_contents($feed_Flickr);
$flickrResponse = str_replace("\\'", "'", $Flickr);
$results = json_decode($flickrResponse, true);
print_r($results);

Demo!