StackOverflow API and PHP CLI and JSON

Question

I'm new to JSON and APIs and I want to make a PHP CLI script that will use StackOverflow API. I've made myself a key and this is my code so far:

<?php

//Call stack API .$key
$google_url = "http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/stats";

//Get and Store API results into a variable
$result = file_get_contents($google_url);
//$jsonArray = json_decode($result);
print_r($result);
//var_dump($jsonArray);

?>

But the print_r($result); returns some strange characters. I can't read it could you give me some info? Any help will be appreciated. The whole project will be an open source search engine about StackOverflow posts and comments!

Answer 1

You need to un gzip it even if you didn't send an accept: gzip header in the http request, because all responses are gzip'd

see How can I read GZIP-ed response from Stackoverflow API in PHP?