How to Validate a JSON File in PHP

Invalid data can cause big problems. Thankfully, we can validate our JSON files easily with just a few lines of code.

Using the PHP examples below, we’ll call an API that’s free to use and takes care of file validation for us. We’ll just need a free Cloudmersive API key to authorize our request (this allows us to make up to 800 API calls per month with no commitment).

We can install the SDK via Composer by running the below command from our command line:

composer require cloudmersive/cloudmersive_document_convert_api_client

Next, we can call the function using the below PHP examples (we’ll enter our JSON file path in the $input_file variable when we make our request):

<?php
require_once(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
$config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKey('Apikey', 'YOUR_API_KEY');



$apiInstance = new Swagger\Client\Api\ValidateDocumentApi(
    
    
    new GuzzleHttp\Client(),
    $config
);
$input_file = "/path/to/inputfile"; // \SplFileObject | Input file to perform the operation on.

try {
    $result = $apiInstance->validateDocumentJsonValidation($input_file);
    print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo 'Exception when calling ValidateDocumentApi->validateDocumentJsonValidation: ', $e->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
}
?>

Now we can quickly find out if our JSON documents are valid. If they aren’t, we’ll get some information about any errors or warnings in the API response.