Question

Currently I’m attempting to simulate hours of the day with my keys for inserting into Mongo and I have something along these lines (simplified) setup:

for($i=0;$i<23;$i++){
    $returnElement["hours"]["$i"] = array();
    foreach($this->list_of_daily_usage_items as $item){
      /* @var $item DailyUsageItem */
      $returnElement["hours"]["$i"][$item->getLabel()] = $item->getDefaultValue();
    }
  }

With this I’m creating something similar to:

 [hours] => Array
    (
        [0] => Array
            (
                [labelOne] => 0
                [labelTwo] => 0
            )
        ....
        [23] => Array
            (
                [labelOne] => 0
                [labelTwo] => 0
            )

    )

However then when i push to JSON It’s converting that to:

"hours": [{
    "labelOne": 0,
    "labelTwo": 0,
}, {
    "labelOne": 0,
    "labelTwo": 0,
}]

Which normally I would expect; however when I’m attempting to make these numeric keys it’s not really what I’m hoping to see..

Is there a way to achieve this short of prepending something like _ to the number to force it to a string?

Thank you

Answer 1

You could add a temporary element to force a PHP Array to be converted a JSON Object

 array("_" => "removeme",
    0 => array("hello" => 0,
           "hell0" => 2),
    1 => array("hello" => 0,
           "hell0" => 2),
    2 => array("hello" => 0,
           "hell0" => 2));

this will generate

{
    "_": "removeme",
    "0": {
        "hello": 0,
        "hell0": 2
    },
    "1": {
        "hello": 0,
        "hell0": 2
    },
    "2": {
        "hello": 0,
        "hell0": 2
    }
}

If we combine this with a neato regexp, we just hassled us past PHPs somewhat evil type system:

$finejson = preg_replace("/\"_\":\".*\",/", "", $json);

which gives us this:

{
    "0": {
        "hello": 0,
        "hell0": 2
    },
    "1": {
        "hello": 0,
        "hell0": 2
    },
    "2": {
        "hello": 0,
        "hell0": 2
    }
}