Question

I’m playing with a guestbook/chatroom idea and have a MySQL table setup with three columns:

1 – id – Primary Key auto increment

2 – name – String

3 – comment – string

I have very little experience with PHP but this is what I’ve put together for this operation:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM guestbook");
$i = 0;
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
      //add the row to the $chat array at specific index of $i
      $chat[$i] = $row;
      $i += 1;
  }

$encode = json_encode($chat);
echo "$encode";

However, output from this looks pretty awful:

[{"0":"1","id":"1","1":"Justin ","name":"Justin ","2":"Comment 1","comment":"Comment 1"},
{"0":"2","id":"2","1":"Justin ","name":"Justin ","2":"Another comment","comment":"Another comment"},
{"0":"3","id":"3","1":"Justin ","name":"Justin ","2":"Look at this comment!","comment":"Look at this comment!"},
{"0":"4","id":"4","1":"Justin ","name":"Justin ","2":"Ok I'm done talking","comment":"Ok I'm done talking"}]

I was hoping to get three fields: id, name, and comment, but it looks like things doubled. Can anyone help?

Thanks!

Answer 1

To paraphrase Marc, Just replace this line:

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))

With this:

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))

To get cleaner JSON. By default mysql_fetch_array() will return both an integer index and an associative index, you only want the associative index.