Question

I’m new to json decoding with php. here’s my situation. I need to grab a very simple json call and parse it on my HTML page. Here’s the contents of that json:

[{"id":"793","date":"Apr. 18, 2011","title":"the cat in the hat","url":"http:\/\/www.somesite.com\/community\/blogs\/id-793"},{"id":"788","date":"Apr. 12, 2011","title":"the fox has sox","url":"http:\/\/www.somesite.com\/community\/blogs\/id-788"}]

etc…

When I go ahead and put that in a string in my php file:

$json = [{...}]
$arr = json_decode($json,true);
foreach($arr as $item) {
    echo "title: ". $item['title'] ."<br>"; 
}

I get the titles printed out w/o a problem. If, instead, I put:

$arr = json_decode("url_path_here",true);
foreach($arr as $item) {
    echo "title: ". $item['title'] ."<br>"; 
}

I get an error, “Invalid argument supplied for foreach() ” and the array is simply empty.

The feed is on a different server during development, if that matters. I’m just not sure what I’m doing wrong here. I’m using PHP 5.

Thanks!

Answer 1

json_decode takes a string, not a URL.

This will likely work:

$arr = json_decode(file_get_contents("url_path_here"),true);
foreach($arr as $item) {
    echo "title: ". $item['title'] ."<br>"; 
}