Codeigniter json_decode view as a variable returns NULL

Can't seem to find the solution to this, I want to load json data from a view variable like this

 $this->json = $this->load->view('/jsonfiles/page.json','',true);

Outputting

var_dump(json_decode($this->json,true));

= NULL

The View seems to be rendering the .json file incorrectly, for the json_decode to fail. (maybe not incorrectly, but in a different format), Ive already tried to utf8_encode, no luck

JSON Variable within the page.json

[
  {
    "page" : {
      "name" : "PageNameHere",
      "date" : true
    }
  }
]

Or is there an alternative to doing this?

UPDATE: Yes it works when its an actual string in the variable like this

$this->json = '[{"page":{"name":"PageNameHere","date":true}}]';
var_dump(json_decode($this->json,true));

SOLUTION: So I've decided to figure this out one, and by my mistake, I had a "," comma in the last part of my JSON, which wasn't in this thread, I shorten the JSON for topic, but I found it, using this neat error switch, able to find JSON rendering errors

 switch (json_last_error()) {
    case JSON_ERROR_NONE:
        echo ' - No errors';
    break;
    case JSON_ERROR_DEPTH:
        echo ' - Maximum stack depth exceeded';
    break;
    case JSON_ERROR_STATE_MISMATCH:
        echo ' - Underflow or the modes mismatch';
    break;
    case JSON_ERROR_CTRL_CHAR:
        echo ' - Unexpected control character found';
    break;
    case JSON_ERROR_SYNTAX:
        echo ' - Syntax error, malformed JSON';
    break;
    case JSON_ERROR_UTF8:
        echo ' - Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded';
    break;
    default:
        echo ' - Unknown error';
    break;
}

My Issue was labeled as "Syntax error, malformed JSON"