Question

I have a string (in PHP) representing a JS array, and for testing purpose would like to convert it to a PHP array to feed them into a unit test. Here’s an example string

{ name: 'unique_name',fof: -1,range: '1',aoe: ',0,0,fp: '99,desc: 'testing ability,image: 'dummy.jpg'}

I could use a explode on the “,” then on the colon, but that is rather inelegant. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

$php_object = json_decode($javascript_array_string)

This will return an object, with properties corresponding to the javascript array’s properties. If you want an associative array, pass true as a second parameter to json_decode

$php_array = json_decode($javascript_array_string, true)

There is also a json_encode function for going the other way.