Question

I need to pass an array to from jquery to php for processing.
i create an array object like this

function Bet(eventId,pick,odds,stake,profit,betType){
 return {
    eventId:eventId,
    pick:pick,
    odds:odds,
    stake:stake,
    profit:profit,
    betType:betType
  }

in my submit handler i have this piece of code

var bets = {};
$(".bet-selection").each(function() {
  /**
  some logic here
  **/
 }
});

bets.push(Bet(eventId,pick,odds,stake,profit,betType));
});

$.ajax({
 url:    'testsubmit.php',
 cache:          false,
 type:   'post',
 data:   bets
});

Nothing happens when i submit the form. I was hoping the an array will be submitted to php and i can use print_r to view the structure. Please guys what am i doing wrong and where?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Fist of all, your code is syntactically and semantically incorrect. I marked the incorrect places with “<—-“

function Bet(eventId,pick,odds,stake,profit,betType){
 return ({
    eventId:eventId,
    pick:pick,
    odds:odds,
    stake:stake,
    profit:profit,
    betType:betType
  });
} <------

 var bets = {};
$(".bet-selection").each(function() {
  /**
  some logic here
  **/
 }

 bets.push(Bet(eventId,pick,odds,stake,profit,betType)); <--- I guess this should be inside the loop, right?
});

Now you cannot just post Javascript objects like this. The best option is encoding them as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which actually encodes them … as JS objects 🙂

Modern browsers include JSON parser/encoder, but older don’t. So include the following library to make sure older browsers won’t break: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js

Next, you’ll need to modify a bit of your code:

$.ajax({
 url:    'testsubmit.php',
 cache:          false,
 type:   'post',
 data:   { bets : JSON.stringify(bets)}
});

On PHP side, use json_decode function to decode JSON string to a PHP array of objects.

<?php

$bets = json_decode($_POST['bets']);
var_dump($bets);

Nice day.