Question

I am trying to make a search box in my web application, and I used ajax post to make a request to my server. My question is:

Is it possible to send looped array values from PHP to my JavaScript?
I want to get all of the results from my server.

CLIENT SIDE: Ajax POST request

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready( function() {
   $.ajax({
       type: "POST",
       url: "searchPlaces.php",
       data: { searchInput: form.searchTxtId.value },
       success: function (result)
       {
            // Get the search result
       }
   });
});
</script>

SERVER SIDE (after retrieving the post from ajax, and making queries):

while ($result = mysql_fetch_assoc ($query))
{
   $resultName = $result['name'];
   $resultAddress = $result['address'];
}

Answer 1

$results = array();
while ($result = mysql_fetch_assoc ($query)) {
   $results[] = $result;
}
echo json_encode(array('results' => $results));

In your success callback you can then iterate over result.results which contains an object with the column names from your query as attributes.

success: function(result) {
    $.each(results, function(i, row) {
        console.log(row.name, row.address);
    })
}

It is also advisable to use dataType: 'json' in your $.ajax({...}); arguments to avoid unnecessary guessing of the response type.

In case you have more columns in the SQL resultset than you want to forward to the client, you could add a custom array in the loop:

$results[] = array('name' => $row['name'], 'address' => $row['address']);