Convert Curl retrieved HTML string to JSON with PHP, serve with AJAX

Question

Hi,

I am building a scraper with Javascript (AJAX; Prototype) and PHP (Curl). The url is served trough AJAX to the PHP/Curl.

The response is a huge HTML string. I would like to send the string in JSON to Javascript so I can process it.

If I send the raw responseText it works just fine, the html (string) get's rendered on my screen. However when I try PHP's json_encode() function, I get 'null'.

What am I doing wrong? Or is there a better way to convert the HTML string to JSON? I'm running PHP5.3, tried JSON_FORCE_OBJECT but no luck.. please help me, I have been banging my head on this one for way too long.. :(

This is the current PHP code (if I remove the json_encode function it works):

$url = $_GET['url'];

$ch = curl_init() or die(curl_error()); 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$scrape = curl_exec($ch) or die(curl_error()); 

echo json_encode($scrape);
echo curl_error($ch);

curl_close($ch);

Answer 1

Does your $scrape contain utf8 encoded string? json_encode() works only with utf8.

Try doing

$scrape = mb_convert_encoding($scrape, 'utf-8');

before json_encode