here i customized a function to return json data correctly (some servers like stackexchange do not allow users to get data from out of browser for security reasons).

api_json_return.php

function api_json_return($final_url){
//I used this function to work on `https://api.stackexchange.com` 
// for example this url returns my stackoverflow data = 'https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/4729243?order=desc&sort=reputation&site=stackoverflow'
		$ch = curl_init($final_url);
	if (! defined("CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0")) {
		define("CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0", 3);
	}
	curl_setopt_array($ch, 
		[
			CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
			CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
			CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => false,
			CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
				"Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
				"Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5",
				"Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br",
				"Connection: keep-alive",
				"Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1",
				"Cache-Control: max-age=0"
			],
			CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0",
			CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => false,
			CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0
		]
	);
	$out = gzdecode(curl_exec($ch));
	$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
	if ($ern = curl_errno($ch)) {
		$err = curl_error($ch);
		curl_close($ch);
		throw new StackoverflowException(
			"Error (".$ern."): ".$err
		);
	}
	curl_close($ch);
	return $out;
}