Attempting to get array with curl_exec

Question

I am trying to get an array from the AnimeCharactersDatabase in order to then produce a table with the results. I had it working once before but cannot remember how I got it to work.

Looking at the url (http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/api_series_characters.php?character_q=Usagi), "search_results" should be itself an array of characters which have arrays of info within them.

   <?php
    
            $url= "http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/api_series_characters.php?character_q=Usagi";
            
            /* gets the data from a URL */      
            function get_acdb($url)
            {
                //ACDB requires certain agents for the query per their documentation.
                $agents = array(
                    'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1',
                    'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100508 SeaMonkey/2.0.4',
                    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; en-US)',
                    'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; da-dk) AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1' ,
                    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 Waterfox/56.2.14',
                    'Lynx/2.8.7dev.4 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8d',
                    'Lynx/2.8.9dev.8 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/3.4.9',
                    'Lynx/2.8.3dev.9 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6',
                    'Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.3; U; x64; en-US) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.18'
                );
    
                $ch = curl_init();
                $timeout = 5;
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
                //I believe this should make it return the data, not just true.
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,$agents[array_rand($agents)]);
                $data = curl_exec($ch);
                curl_close($ch);
                
                return json_decode($data, true);
            }
    
            /* Parse the data into Characters. */
            $arr = get_acdb($url);
            $arr = array($arr["search_results"]);
            //Upon testing, this is always an array of 1, and $arr[0] shows no value. This is where I need help, making the for each loop actually add characters to the new array SearchArray.
                $i=-1;
                    
            foreach ($arr[0] as $xyz) {

//I never get within this function because there $arr[0] doesn't seem to be an array. $i=$i+1;

                                $CharName = $arr[0][$i]["name"];
                                $CharID = $arr[0][$i]["id"];
                                $SeriesID = $arr[0][$i]["anime_id"];
                                $SeriesName = $arr[0][$i]["anime_name"];
                                $medialenA = strlen($CharName) + 25;
                                $medialenB = strlen($SeriesName) + 2;
                                $mediatype = substr($arr[0][$i]["desc"],$medialenA);
                                $mediatype = substr($mediatype,0,strlen($mediatype) -$medialenB);
                                $CharSex = $arr[0][$i]["gender"];
    
    
    
                                {
                                //Add relevant matches to Array.
                                    $SearchArray[] = array(
                                        'CharID'=>$CharID,
                                        'Name'=>$CharName,
                                        'SeriesID'=>$SeriesID,
                                        'SeriesName'=>$SeriesName,
                                        'Sex'=>$CharSex,
                                        );
                                }
                }
        
    ?>

Answer 1

I have modified a bit your code but it is fully functional

<?php
$url = "https://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/api_series_characters.php?character_q=Usagi";

function getData($url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    //I believe this should make it return the data, not just true.
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1');
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $data;
}

$results= getData($url);
$objectResults= json_decode($results);
foreach($objectResults->search_results as $character){

   echo $character->anime_id."\n";
    echo $character->anime_name."\n";
    echo $character->anime_image."\n";
    echo $character->character_image."\n";
    echo $character->id."\n";
    echo $character->gender."\n";
    echo $character->name."\n";
    echo $character->desc."\n";
    echo"\n\n";

}