Question

In a simple ajax post example:

$.post('ajax/test.php', function(data) {
$('.result').html(data);
});

Is there any way to separate the result data to do two different things? ie:

$.post('ajax/test.php', function(data) {
$('.result').html(data.partone);
$('.other-result').html(data.parttwo);
});

I run an ajax request when the page is loaded and I’m trying to get everything I need in one POST. If this is possible, how do you define the different data parts on the PHP side? (ie: data.partone and data.parttwo)

Answer 1

You can return the data as JSON encoded string, using json_encode() on an associative array, for example: echo json_encode(array("partone" => "data1", "parttwo" => "data2"));

That way you could access it as data.partone and data.parttwo. Also worth mentioning, you should define the dataType in the $.post() to be read as JSON. For that, you need to add another parameter to it, specifying the type of data you are returning – JSON.

For example: $.post('ajax/test.php', function(data) { ... }, "JSON");

Also worth mentioning, that you should return ONLY this json_encode() output back from the ajax script, else jQuery won’t be able to parse it right.