Question

I’m new to JSON, but I have experience in PHP. Can someone explain to me how JSON works, especially with PHP, and EASY way would be nice.

EX: I have a php array like:

array(
    array('id' => 1, 'img' => "http.img1.png", 'title' => 'ice cream'),
    array('id' => 2, 'img' => "http.img2.png", 'title' => 'silly snail'),
    array('id' => 3, 'img' => "http.img3.png", 'title' => 'big bear'),
    array('id' => 4, 'img' => "http.img4.png", 'title' => 'Funny cat'),
);

is this fine, or should I alter this array? I want to convert this to a JSON Object. In the php array should there be a parent, and do I have to assign array elements as children, or can each php obj be it’s own JSON obj? Thank you!

Answer 1

Just run json_encode on the variable that you want to turn into a json string.

$something = array("test" => array("value", "another value", 4));
echo json_encode($something)

This will produce

{"test":["value","another value",4]}

Also, putting that string into $something = json_decode("{"test":["value","another value",4]}"); will produce back the same array that was passed into json_encode.

Note that JSON is not a programming language; it is a way to represent objects. http://json.org has a complete visual representation of how to use it. JSON’s main components are Arrays (surrounded by []) and Objects (surrounded by {}). Arrays are lists of comma separated values (see json.org for how to tell it the types…its pretty simple) while objects are key:value pairs separated by commas between each pair where they key is a string surrounded by quotation marks. Above I created an Object with a key called “test” whose value was an Array with two strings and a number in it.