Question

I am not able to serialize the JSON object “data”, shown below.

<script type="text/javascript">

var myObj = {'first_name':{'answers':{'0':'John'}}};
var postdata = {'data':myObj};
$.post("get_note.php", postdata, function(data){
    $('#note').text(data);
});

</script>

Following is the code in file get_note.php:

<?php

print_r($_POST['data']);
?>

This results in the following being printed to the #note element.

Array ( [first_name] => ) 

The array appears to be empty. I was expecting a multidimensional array in the PHP file. Why is it empty?

Answer 1

On the client, you can serialize by doing JSON.stringify() for pure javascript. On the server, you’ll need to do a php json_decode() on the string.

So on the client:

var postdata = {'data':JSON.stringify(myObj)};

and on the server:

$myObj = json_decode(htmlspecialchars_decode($_POST['data']),true);

References:

js JSON.stringify(): http://www.json.org/js.html

php json_decode(): http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php