Best way to store data retrieved from JSON file?

I'm hoping to store data I get from a server which sends data via JSON. I don't want anything fancy - just would like to save the data so I can play with it in excel.

Here is the JSON URL: http://re开发者_如何学Pythonalm3.castle.wonderhill.com/api/map.json

I'm extremely surprised there are no solutions out there on this yet.

What would you guys used to achieve this?

Convert the json into a text file formatted as CSV - Excel can read that. I'll come up with some sample code in PHP after dinner.

EDIT: Bah, dinner can wait.

<?php

// Download data to a string
$mapData = file_get_contents('http://realm3.castle.wonderhill.com/api/map.json');

// Convert JSON into an Array
$mapData = json_decode($mapData);

var_dump($mapData);
echo "\n";

Saved the above into test.php and then ran it like this:

php test.php | less

and the output is a huge data structure. You'll need to extract what you want and then use fputcsv() to write the content to a file that you'll then read into Excel. The output doesn't seem to have any special characters, but if you do have a problem make sure to encode the data as CP1252 so Excel for Windows can read it.