Question

I’m not familiar with PHP and JSON but need it for my Android project.

I’m confused about which JSON format is the most effective. Most examples I saw use Associative array by using this code:

$result = mysql_query($queryString)
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
    $json['contact']['ID'] = $row['ID'];
    $json['contact']['Name'] = $row['Name'];
}

Format #1

{"contact":{"ID":"1","Name":"Andy"}}

I like that format but I don’t know how to make each key hold more than one value. So when my query returns Andy and Bob, the json will only contains Bob.

Then, I found this PHP code:

while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)){
    $json['contact'][] = $row;
}
echo json_encode($json);

It makes the json looks like this:

Format #2

{"contact":[["1","Andy"],["2","Bob"]]}

But in Android, there is no JSONObject method to getArray(). Even if there is, I want to avoid using numbered array that requires [0] or [1] to be called.

So, which one is better? Or any other alternative?

Thanks

Answer 1

It’s not that one method is more “effective” than the other, they serve different purposes. One is an associative object, and the other is a indexed array.

In your case, it looks like you want a list (indexed array) of objects. So what i would recommend doing is:

$result = mysql_query($queryString)
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)){
    $json['contact'][] = $row;
}
echo json_encode($json);

which would result in the json:

{"contact":[{"ID":"1","Name":"Andy"}, {"ID":"2","Name":"Bob"}]}