MacLochlainns Weblog

Sometimes I get poorly thought or just naive questions. That is naive questions because they didn’t read the documentation or don’t understand the semantics of a given programming language. The question this time said they tried to implement what they found on a web page but their sample json_decode function example failed after they followed directions.

Surprise, it didn’t fail because they followed directions. They overlooked part of the example because they didn’t understand how to read a nested array in PHP. The actual example sets up an array of JSON objects, then print_r to read the Array, but the student tried to read it in a foreach loop. Naturally, their sample program raised an error because the base object was an Array not a String, and their target JSON object was nested inside the base Array.

I rewrote the example file to simply convert a JSON structure to an associative array, as follow:

<?php
  // Assign a JSON object to a variable.
  $someJSON = '{"name":"Joe","moniker":"Falchetto"}';
 
  // Convert the JSON to an associative array.
  $someArray = json_decode($someJSON, true);
 
  // Read the elements of the associative array.
  foreach ($someArray as $key =--> $value) {
    echo "[" . $key . "][" . $value . "]";
  }
?>

When you call the program, like this

php test.php

It displays

[name][Joe][moniker][Falchetto]

As always, I hope this helps those looking to display a JSON structure in PHP.