How to JSON decode with \\n in php - php

Question

I have a JSON structure as below
$json = '{"Number1":"{\"answerPhrase\":\"\\nTEXT,\\nTEXT
TEXT\\n\",\"dateUpdatedInMillisecond\":1234}"}';
When trying to extract the text and numbers I can do the first step and it works but the nested JSON has \\n and it does not give the text as output
The PHP code is as below
$result = json_decode($json);
print_r($result);
echo "<br>";
foreach($result as $key=>$value){
echo $key.$value;
echo "<br>";
$result_nest = json_decode($value);
echo $result_nest->answerPhrase;
echo "<br>";
Why can I not get the text in answerphrase? It works when the text does not have \\n

Answer 1

You may try the below one. You can replace the \n with some other characters. If you want to display enter in browser then you can replace \n with . Please try the below code and let me know if it worked for you.
<?php
$json = '{"Number1":"{\"answerPhrase\":\"\\nTEXT,\\nTEXT TEXT\\n\",\"dateUpdatedInMillisecond\":1234}"}';
$result = json_decode($json);
print_r($result);
echo "\n";
foreach($result as $key=>$value){
echo $key.$value;
echo "<br>";
$value = preg_replace("/\\n/", "___n___", $value);
$result_nest = json_decode($value);
$result_nest->answerPhrase = preg_replace("/___n___/", "\n", $result_nest->answerPhrase);
echo $result_nest->answerPhrase;
echo "<br>";
}

Answer 2

Prefer to fix json before decode and then decode the sub json.
you could do second step in a loop
function test2()
{
$string = '{"Number1":"{\"answerPhrase\":\"\\nTEXT,\\nTEXT
TEXT\\n\",\"dateUpdatedInMillisecond\":1234}"}';
$json = $this->decodeComplexJson($string);
$number = $json->Number1;
//Put this in a loop if you want
$decodedNumber = $this->decodeComplexJson($number);
var_dump($decodedNumber);
echo $decodedNumber->answerPhrase;
}
function decodeComplexJson($string) { # list from www.json.org: (\b backspace, \f formfeed)
$string = preg_replace("/[\r\n]+/", " ", $string);
$json = utf8_encode($string);
$json = json_decode($json);
return $json;
}