Question

I’m designing an application that will benefit from having the user’s Facebook friends suggested to them as they type. The difficulty I’m having is turning the Open Graph result (when accessing a users friends through graph.facebook.com/me) into the format that is required by the AutoSuggest jQuery plugin.

I know I can decode this JSON result into an array by using $user = json_decode(file_get_contents($graph_url)); but I’m not experienced enough with PHP to then access parts of this array and put it into the below format.

Format required: ["First Friend","Second Friend","Third Friend"]

Current format: ( [data] => Array ( [0] => ( [name] => Ryan Brodie [id] => 740079895 ) ) [paging] => ( [next] => https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN&limit=5000&offset=5000&__after_id=USERID ) )

Thank’s in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Zombat’s answer is almost correct

$user = json_decode(file_get_contents($graph_url));
$friends = array();
foreach($user->data as $friend) {
    $friends[] = $friend->name;
}

echo json_encode($friends);