What are some key considerations to keep in mind when working with cURL in PHP to retrieve and process JSON data from external sources?

When working with cURL in PHP to retrieve and process JSON data from external sources, it is important to set the appropriate cURL options, handle errors properly, and decode the JSON response into a PHP array for further processing.

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set cURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com/api/data');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute cURL session
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Check for errors
if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    echo 'Error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Decode JSON response into PHP array
$data = json_decode($response, true);

// Process the data
if ($data) {
    foreach ($data as $item) {
        echo $item['key'] . ': ' . $item['value'] . '<br>';
    }
} else {
    echo 'Error decoding JSON response';
}