Question

I have a form I’ve built in PHP and storing the form field values upon submission by the user in a MySQL database. The form is extremely long and may change periodically. So I used the json_encode functionality to store all the form values into the database. Now I need pull that info out of the database and print it out in the key/value relationship.

So for example, in the database, here’s the row named “json_payload” with some example values in this format:

{"last_name":"Smith","first_name":"John","middle_name":"Doe"..."phone_number":"111.222.3333"}

I need to figure out how to loop through this row in the database and print out all the key/value relationships with PHP in a table format so the above example would end up looking like so:

<table>
<tr>
<td>Last Name</td>
<td>Smith</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>First Name</td>
<td>John</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Middle Name</td>
<td>Doe</td>
</tr>
...
<tr>
<td>Phone Number</td>
<td>111.222.3333</td>
</tr>
</table>

Answer 1

JSON is normally used for Javascript/AJAX; in PHP, it’s preferred to use serialize() and unserialize(). But JSON will still work; just decode with json_decode() and loop through the array, outputting your markup:

$json_array = json_decode($json_string, true); // decode as array rather than object

echo '<table>';
foreach($json_array as $key => $value)
{
    echo '<tr>';
    echo '<td>'.ucfirst(str_replace('_', ' ', $key)).'</td>';
    echo '<td>'.$value.'</td>';
    echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table>';