Question

I have the follow string that I need to parse, and then run it through json_decode. My code is as follows. Right now I can’t use json_decode because I am not able to properly parse the string it has more than one instance of json and i need to have the preg_match_all break it up like so {}, {}, {}.

CODE

$source = getHTML($URL); //get page source with curl
preg_match('/var\smessages\s\=\s\[(.*?)\]\;/', $source , $json);

echo $json_final = json_decode($json[0]);
echo $json_final_2 = json_decode($json[1]);

Answer 1

You can use preg_match_all, accepting the [ and ] on group too (regex: /var\smessages\s\=\s(\[.*?\])\;/). So you will have zero or more JSON valid string syntax at array[1] (after json_decode).

Now to you call this values, you can use foreach:

foreach($json[1] as $messages) {
    $messages = json_decode($messages, true);
    foreach($messages as $message) {
        // Do what you need with the message here!
        echo "{$message[CreationTime]}: {$message[MessageText]}<br />";
    }
}

Note that the json_decode receives true on 2nd arg. It say to this function that need return an array, instead of an object (stdClass).

Take a look: http://codepad.viper-7.com/XtAiBH