Question

I’m trying to decode the following JSON using php json_decode function.

[{“total_count”:17}]

I think the square brackets in output is preventing it. How do I get around that? I can’t control the output because it is coming from Facebook FQL query:

https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?format=json&query=SELECT%20total_count%20FROM%20link_stat%20WHERE%20url=%22http://www.apple.com%22

Answer 1

PHP’s json_decode returns an instance of stdClass by default.

For you, it’s probably easier to deal with array. You can force PHP to return arrays, as a second parameter to json_decode:

$var = json_decode('[{"total_count":17}]', true);

After that, you can access the variable as $result[0]['total_count']