How to force int to string in Laravel JSON? - php

I've recently updated my server to a newer version of MySQL and PHP 7 for various reasons. On my previous instance, running PHP 5.5, Laravel's response()->json() always converted tinyint's into a string. Now running newer server software, it's returning me int's -as it should...
I'd have to change a lots of my codebase to either cast types / convert them into a string manually, whic I'm trying to avoid at the moment.
Is there a way to somehow force response()->json() to return int's as string's?

Is there a way to somehow force response()->json() to return int's as string's
I don't want to change the code base - do not want to cast types, convert it,
No. There's no option for that. You need to do that yourself if needed.

There is a way to cast integer into string in laravel
in your model you can cast id to string. Its as follows
protected $casts = [ 'id' => 'string' ];
But the downside is that you would have to do that for all Models.

If you don't want to modify a lot of code you could run response data through a quick and dirty function. Instead of going directory to JSON you should instead grab the data as a nested array. Then put it through a function like this:
function convertIntToString ($myArray) {
foreach ($myArray as $thisKey => $thisValue) {
if (is_array($thisValue)) {
// recurse to handle a nested array
$myArray[$thisKey] = convertIntToString($thisValue);
} elseif (is_integer($thisValue)) {
// convert any integers to a string
$myArray[$thisKey] = (string) $thisValue;
}
}
return $myArray;
}
The function will convert integers to strings and use recursion to handle nested arrays. Take the output from that and then convert it to JSON.

The best solution for me is to to use attribute casting and
Fractal transformers
Fractal transformers are extremely useful when you have complex responses with multiple relations included.

You can typecast it to string:
return response->json(["data" => (string)1]);

Related

Get objects instead of an array with CodeIgniter + MongoDB

While using Codeigniter and its built-in class Mongo, is it possible to get objects instead of arrays?
I'd rather access documents via $doc->id than $doc['id']. Thanks.
The PHP MongoDB lib will always return result as array. If you wish to work with objects instead of arrays you will need to handle conversion yourself. As converting to an object is not as easy as casting type you would have to write your own function to convert it to an object.
You could do something in a sense
$obj = new stdClass();
foreach($mongoResult as $key => $val){
$obj -> $key = $val;
}
Obviously this will work on basic result sets. You would need to write a more sophisticated function to handle more complex arrays.
I believe the issue has to do with how you are querying the database.
$this->db->query()->get->result();
Will give you objects.
$this->db->query()->get()->result_array();
Will give you arrays

Empty array in PHP -> JSON -> JS = empty array in Javascript. How to get empty Object instead?

So here is the basis for building my JSON response back to my JS.
$this->_response['vendor'] = array();
foreach ($_results as $_row) {
$this->_response['vendor'][$_row['id']] = $_row;
}
echo(json_encode($this->_response));
This is fine and builds objects in javascript fine, unless there were no results. In that case, the php sees it as an empty numeric array, instead of an associative array. This then comes down to javascript and converts to an empty array instead of an empty object.
I know I can fix this in a number of ways by checking things, pre-declaring the variables as objects in javascript etc. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to declare an empty associative array in php, or some other way to force json_encode to create an object ("{}") instead.
It's a known limitation of PHP - since it doesn't support JavaScript types natively (eg. objects), decoding and then encoding again may lead to data loss.
I use a workaround like this to keep JSON in tact:
/**
* #param $input
* #return array
*/
public static function safeDecode($input) {
// Fix for PHP's issue with empty objects
$input = preg_replace('/{\s*}/', "{\"EMPTY_OBJECT\":true}", $input);
return json_decode($input, true);
}
/**
* #param array|object $input
* #return string
*/
public static function safeEncode($input) {
return preg_replace('/{"EMPTY_OBJECT"\s*:\s*true}/', '{}', json_encode($input));
}
It's not ideal but it works. Note that you can:
json_decode() to objects, which is default manner. Then empty objects are not lost, but most modern frameworks REQUIRE arrays because most collection manipulation tools work with arrays. Therefore, in most cases it's not a viable option;
You could force json_encode() to encode empty arrays to objects but then you will lose empty arrays - not a nice option either.
Therefore, a work around like mine shown above is perhaps the only option at this moment. In short, you have to extend PHPs json_encode() and json_decode(). Unfortunately PHP doesn't allow built-in function overloading so you have to define functions with different names.
I suppose the most reasonable answer here is that there's probably no point in delivering an empty array or object in the first place. Simple checks for existence in the javascript would then handle the problem.
if (count($_results)) {
$this->_response['vendor'] = array();
foreach ($_results as $_row) {
$this->_response['vendor'][$_row['id']] = $_row;
}
}
echo(json_encode($this->_response));

Unify variable types of array elements

After hours of debugging, I found an error in one of my scripts. For saving different event types in a database, I have an array of unique data for each event that can be used to identify the event.
So I basically have some code like
$key = md5(json_encode($data));
to generate a unique key for each event.
Now, in some cases, a value in the $data array is an integer, sometimes a string (depending on where it comes from - database or URL). That causes the outputs of json_encode() to be different from each other, though - once including quotes, once not.
Does anybody know a way to "unify" the variable types in the $data array? That would probably mean converting all strings that only contain an integer value to integer. Anything else I have to take care of when using json_encode()?
array_walk_recursive combined with a function you have written to the effect of maybe_intval which performs the conversion you talk about on a single element.
EDIT: having read the documentation for array_walk_recursive more closely you'll actually want to write your own recursive function
function to_json($obj){
if(is_object($obj))
$obj=(array)$obj;
if(is_array($obj))
return array_map('to_json',$obj);
return "$obj"; // or return is_int($obj)?intval($obj):$obj;
}

Problem with json_encode()

i have an simple array:
array
0 => string 'Kum' (length=3)
1 => string 'Kumpel' (length=6)
when I encode the array using json_encode(), i get following:
["Kum","Kumpel"]
My question is, what is the reason to get ["Kum","Kumpel"] instead of { "0" : "Kum", "1" : "Kumpel" }?
"{}" brackets specify an object and "[]" are used for arrays according to JSON specification. Arrays don't have enumeration, if you look at it from memory allocation perspective. It's just data followed by more data, objects from other hand have properties with names and the data is assigned to the properties, therefore to encode such object you must also pass the correct property names. But for array you don't need to specify the indexes, because they always will be 0..n, where n is the length of the array - 1, the only thing that matters is the order of data.
$array = array("a","b","c");
json_encode($array); // ["a","b","c"]
json_encode($array, JSON_FORCE_OBJECT); // {"0":"a", "1":"b","2":"c"}
The reason why JSON_FORCE_OBJECT foces it to use "0,1,2" is because to assign data to obeject you must assign it to a property, since no property names are given by developer (only the data) the encoder uses array indexes as property names, because those are the only names which would make sense.
Note: according to PHP manual the options parameters are only available from PHP 5.3.
For older PHP versions refer to chelmertz's answer for a way to make json_encode to use indexes.
As Gumbo said, on the JS-side it won't matter. To force PHP into it, try this:
$a = new stdClass();
$a->{0} = "Kum";
$a->{1} = "Kumpel";
echo json_encode($a);
Not that usable, I'd stick with the array notation.
Just cast as an object and it will work fine...the JSON_FORCE_OBJECT parameter does exactly the same thing.
json_encode((object)$array);
Don't forget to convert it back into a php array so you can access its values in php:
$array = (object)$array;
$array = (array)$array;
json_encode($array);
Since you’re having a PHP array with just numeric keys, there is no need to use a JavaScript object. But if you need one, try Maiku Mori’s suggestion.
I personally think this is a bug that needs to be fixed in PHP. JSON_FORCE_OBJECT is absolutely not an answer. If you try to do any sort of generic programming you get tripped up constantly. For example, the following is valid PHP:
array("0" => array(0,1,2,3), "1" => array(4,5,6,7));
And should be converted to
{"0": [0,1,2,3], "1": [4,5,6,7]}
Yet PHP expects me to either accept
[[0,1,2,3],[4,5,6,7]]
or
{"0":{"0":1,"1":1,"2":2,"3":3},"1":{"0":4,"1":5,"2":6,"3":7}}
Neither of which are right at all. How can I possibly decode an object like that? What possible reason is there to ever change something that is clearly using strings as indexes? It's like PHP was trying to be clever to help out idiotic people who can't differentiate strings from ints, but in the process messed up anyone legitimately using strings as indexes, regardless of what the value COULD be turned into.

How can I convert all values of an array to floats in PHP?

I am fetching an array of floats from my database but the array I get has converted the values to strings.
How can I convert them into floats again without looping through the array?
Alternatively, how can I fetch the values from the database without converting them to strings?
EDIT:
I am using the Zend Framework and I am using PDO_mysql. The values are stored one per column and that is a requirement so I can't serialize them.
array_map('floatval', $array) only works on single dimensional arrays.
I can't floatval the single elements when I use them because I have to pass an array to my flash chart.
The momentary, non-generic solution is to extract the rows and do array_map('floatval',$array) with each row.
You could use
$floats = array_map('floatval', $nonFloats);
There is the option PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES but from what I remember, MySQL always has it as true
Edit: see Bug 44341 which confirms MySQL doesn't support turning off stringify.
Edit: you can also map a custom function like this:
function toFloats($array)
{
return array_map('floatval', $array);
}
$data = array_map('toFloats', $my2DArray);
How are you getting your data? mysql, mysqli or PDO, some other way or even some other database?
you could use array_map with floatval like so:
$data = array_map('floatval', $data);
but that still executes a loop and i think it assumes you only have one column in your data.
you're probably best of casting to float when you use your value, if you have to. php is likely to do a good job of interpreting it right anyway.
LOL... are you working on the same project I am tharkun?
I just finished (last night) creating something, in a ZF based project, that uses pdo_mysql to retrieve and format data and then output it as xml for use in a flash piece. The values were going in as strings but needed to be floats.
Since I'm also the one who wrote the part that gets the data and the one who created the database I just made sure the data was converted to float before it went into the database.
I simply cast the values as float as part of some other formatting, for what it is worth.
protected function _c2f($input)
{
$input = (float)$input;
$output = round(($input * 1.8) + 32, 2);
return $output;
}
I found an easy way for this operation.
You can do this just by adding foreach loop to your code. foreach loop is used to fetch your array string data one by one. and then, you can simply convert this by function number_format. i used 2 place after convert to float value. i.e it used to print value after dot value 2 place.
$example= array("12.20", "15.05", "55.70");
foreach($example as $float)
{
$update_value = number_format($float,2);
echo $update_value."<br>";
}
Not sure what you're asking here? You can cast a string to a float, using (float) $string, but since PHP is dynamically typed, that will happen anyway, when needed. There is no reason to do an explicit cast.
What are you using floating point values for?

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