Question

I am currently working on a php/html/javascript project and am doing ajax post to a php script which returns json encoded data. Within this json encoded there is some more json encoded data.

Below is how I am json encoding the data

$category[0]['Category'] = "Category 1";
    $category[1]['Category'] = "Category 2";

    $article['Date'] = "11/11/2012 22:42:00";
    $article['Title'] = "This is the title";
    $article['Subtitle'] = "This is the subtitle";
    $article['Content'] = "This is the content1";
    $article['ViaName'] = "SomeSite";
    $article['ViaAddress'] = "http://localhost";
    $article['SourceName'] = "N/A";
    $article['SourceAddress'] = "N/A";
    $article['categories'] = json_encode($category);

    echo json_encode($article);

The $article that gets json encoded I can access fine when it is returned to the javascript using json.Title, json.Subtitle etc.

But when I try and get the categories it doesn’t work.

I’ve tried using json.categories and this prints out the following:

[{"Category":"Category 1"},{"Category":"Category 2"}]

This looks like its working so when I try and access each individual part it then doesn’t work. I’ve tried json.categories[0].Category and json.categories.Category[0] but it keeps on coming up an undefined.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

If you encode an array with json_encode you got a string. So, in your case, json.categories is a string and not an array.

However, json_encode (and decode) is recursive.

So you should use simply

$article['categories'] = $category;

without encode again.