note 78629 added to function.curl-exec

Been beating my head against the wall to figure this one out. I am calling a JSON service from PHP using cURL. I am succesfully retrieving the response from the POST to the service (the service is expecting a post). If I display the response, it is indeed what I expect. However, when I call PHP's json_decode() on it, json_decode fails. After a long debugging session, I discovered that the response from curl_exec() contains many control and unprintable characters. If I capture this response and manually clean it up, json_decode() works as expected. Here is an example of a hex dump of the first few characters of the response. EF BB BF 7B 0A 20 20 22 69 64 22 3A 20 30 2C 0A 20 20 22 65 72 72 6F 72 22 3A 20 6E 75 6C 6C 2C 0A 20 20 22 72 65 73 75 6C 74 22 3A 20 7B 0A 20 20 20 20 22 55 70 6C 6F 61 64 65 64 4F 6E 22 3A 20 7B 0A 20 20 20 20 20 20 22 56 61 6C 75 65 22 3A 20 22 32 30 30 36 2D 30 36 2D Does anyone know what is going on and more importantly, what I can do about it? thanks! ---- Server IP: 64.71.164.2 Probable Submitter: 68.189.241.41 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/78629 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/78629 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/78629 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php