Question

Consider the following:

<?php
//daytime_check.php
    $is_daytime = false;
    if ($is_daytime) {
        echo '1';
    } else {
        echo '0';
    }
?>

==================================================================================

// javascript/jQuery
$.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    url: 'daytime_check.php',
    success: function(response) {
        if(response == false) {
            alert('Goodnight, brother');
        } else {
            alert('Day\'s a wastin, brother');
        }            
    },
    error: function() {
        //handle error
    }
});

This is how I have heretofore handled the responses from my AJAX’d PHP scripts. I’m hoping someone out there can give me some hints on a better way, as this current method feels pretty clunky.

Especially clunky is handling the “filtering” of the PHP script’s output on the JS side. For example:

In this case, the response from PHP is going to be a JS var response ='0'. Now one can’t simply use if (!response)... in JS to filter, because apparently !response evaluates to false, while, interestingly, response == false evaluates to true. Something to do with type juggling, I suppose.

Since the only way I can return things from PHP is in text (echo statements), I can’t return proper true/false values to filter on when I get to the JS side. Is there a better way to handle this?

I hope this made at least a little sense.

Answer 1

You can stil return any type you would like to. Just use JSON response.

// you can return what ever you want via JSON
die(json_encode(array(
    'isDateTime' => $is_datetime,
    'message'    => 'Some optional message to display',
    'timestamp'  => time()
)));

This will output this string:

{"isDateTime":false,"message":"Some optional message to display","timestamp":1332792739}

And on client side jQuery will parse this response:

$.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    url: 'daytime_check.php',
    dataType: 'json',
    success: function(response) {
        if (response.isDateTime) { ... }
        // typeof response.isDateTime == 'boolean'
        // alert(response.message)         
    },
    error: function() {
        //handle error
    }
});