Question

I have a json file in format

{
    "list" : {
           "1" : {
                "thing1" : "description",
                "thing2" : "description",
                "thing3" : "description"
            },
           "2" : {
                "thing1" : "description",
                "thing2" : "description",
                "thing3" : "description"
            },
            etc.

}

I need to search through and return data based on the description of thing 2 but I also need to then return the number of the list. Problem is the json file comes in with the numbers all out of order so I can’t just increment a variable as I go through them all.

currently I have my code setup like this:

$json = json_decode($response);
foreach($json->list as $item) {
        $i++;
        if($item->thing2 == "description") {
            echo "<p>$item->thing1</p>";
            echo "<p>$item->thing2</p>";
            echo "<p>$item->thing3</p>";
            echo "<p>position: $i</p><br /><br />";
        }
    }

unfortunately because the positions are out of order everytime the $i variable is retuning the wrong position. How can I return the title of the item that has the proper thing2 description.

Answer 1

The setting the second parameter of json_decode() to TRUE returns an associative array which is a bit more conducive to what you want to do:

$json = json_decode($response, TRUE);
foreach($json['list'] as $key => $item) {
    if($item['thing2'] == "description") {
        echo "<p>$item['thing1']</p>";
        echo "<p>$item['thing2']</p>";
        echo "<p>$item['thing3']</p>";
        echo "<p>position: $key</p><br /><br />";
    }
}

Should do the trick.