Question

I am making use of an available API to send requests and receive the results which is in json and xml formats. I am able to do so but how do I display the returned data properly?

I used json_decode and assign the xml data to an array and print_r those. It shows up in a huge junk of data.

How do I show it on a table form? Or must I save the data into individual files or database first before displaying?

I am new to PHP, thus not sure how to implement this.

Answer 1

JSON is a multidimensional-array, the easiest way to view it, in my opinion, is to just

var_dump($json_array);

Though, this may be the chunk of data you’re referring to.

It’s not a very table friendly format, as a table is inherently 2-dimensional, and JSON can be many-dimensional.

You can flatten the array, and then display it as a table.

function flatten_json($json, &$flat, $key) {

    // First check the base case: if the arg is not an array,
    //   then it's data to be inserted in the flat array.
    if (!is_array($json)) {
        $flat[$key] = $json;
    } else {

        // It's an array, to reduce the depth of the json,
        // we remove this array, by iterating through it,
        // sending the elements to be checked if they're also arrays,
        // or if they're data to be inserted into the flat array.

        foreach ($json as $name => $element) {
            flatten_json($element, $flat, $key.'_'.$name);
        }
    }
}

To use this function, you first declare you flat array:

$flat = array();

Then pass it to the function, with your json, and a key you want to be the outer key, if you are sure that your json is an array, which is pretty much guaranteed, you can leave the key empty.

flatten_json($json_array, $flat, '');

Now $flat will have the flattened json, and you can print it as a table, maybe into a csv if you have many json results to print.

If your json was:

array(
    'person' => array(
        'name' => 'timmy',
        'age' => '5'
    ),
    'car' => array(
        'make' => 'ford',
        'engine' => array(
            'hp' => 260,
            'cyls' => 8
        )
     )
 )

Then $flat will look like:

array(
    'person_name' => 'timmy',
    'person_age' => 5,
    'car_make' => 'ford',
    'car_engine_hp' => 260,
    'car_engine_cyls' => 8
)

and if you wanted printed in a nice html table:

echo "<table><tr>";
foreach ($flat as $header => $value) {
    echo "<th>$header</th>;
}

echo "</tr><tr>";

foreach ($flat as $header => $value) {
    echo "<td>$value</td>";
}

echo "</tr></table>";