Question

I’m fairly new to json, and I’m having an issue with json_decode. I think I know why, but I haven’t been able to sort out how to fix it.

Basically, I have a URL that supplies json info. I grab it using cURL, and return it as a PHP variable, and that’s working just fine. I can print_r out all the info I want. However, when I use json_decode($json, true), it returns NULL.

I THINK it’s because, technically, what’s being returned is not a string, but more like an object – and I can’t sort out how to grab the contents of that object.

For example, when I return the json stuff as a php variable:

print_r($json);

The output returned looks like so (I won’t do it exactly, because it’s HUGE, so I’ll show you the layout to keep it simple)

MyThing.returnedItems({MyThing.returnedItems({
"projects":[{
    "completed":"2010-12-21",
    "status":"finished",
    "favorited":0,
    "started":"2010-12-20",
    "percentage":78,
    "permalink":"slug to post",
    "size":"One size",
    "thumbnail":{"src":"full path to full size image",
                 "medium":"full path to thumbnail"},
    "name":"Some title here",
    "notes":"description here",
    "url":"URL to page",
    "comments":0},

So you can see it’s like a nested array. I don’t mind that, but I’d like to be able to access all the key/value pairs of these arrays as PHP variables. But it seems because of the “MyThing.returnedItems()” surrounding it, it doesn’t see it as a string to decode, so I get a NULL value every time.

Anyone know what I’m missing here? Once I figure out how to grab the stuff inside there, I think I’ve got it (simple foreach or whatnot to get the rest of the variables as needed), but I just can’t seem to get in there.

Answer 1

This is valid JSON

{
"item1": [
    {
        "something": [],
        "something else": "some value"
    }
],
"another fun thing": [
    {
        "more fun": "fun value 1",
        "even more!": "fun value 2"
    }
],
"item2": {
    "another thing": "another value"
}
}

This is not!

 MyThing.returnedItems({
 "item1":[{"something:[],
           "something else": "some value"},
           "another fun thing": [{"more fun": "fun value 1",
                                  "even more!": "fun value 2"}]
         ],
 "item2":{"another thing": "another value"}
 })

Its a javascript method call