PHP - How to append to a JSON file - php

Question

I generate JSON files which I load into datatables, and these JSON files can contain thousands of rows from my database. To generate them, I need to loop through every row in the database and add each database row as a new row in the JSON file. The problem I'm running into is this:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 262643 bytes)
What I'm doing is I get the JSON file with file_get_contents($json_file) and decode it into an array then I add a new row to the array, then encode the array back into JSON and export it to the file with file_put_contents($json_file).
Is there a better way to do this? Is there a way I can prevent the memory increasing with each loop iteration? Or is there a way I can clear the memory before it reaches the limit? I need the script to run to completion, but with this memory problem it barely gets up to 5% completion before crashing.
I can keep rerunning the script and each time I rerun it, it adds more rows to the JSON file, so if this memory problem is unavoidable, is there a way to automatically rerun the script numerous times until its finished? For example could I detect the memory usage, and detect when its about to reach the limit, then exit out of the script and restart it? I'm on wpengine so they won't allow security risky functions like exec().

Answer 1

So I switched to using CSV files and it solved the memory problem. The script runs vastly faster too. JQuery DataTables doesn't have built in support for CSV files, so I wrote a function to convert the CSV file to JSON:
public function csv_to_json($post_type) {
$data = array(
"recordsTotal" => $this->num_rows,
"recordsFiltered" => $this->num_rows,
"data"=>array()
);
if (($handle = fopen($this->csv_file, 'r')) === false) {
die('Error opening file');
}
$headers = fgetcsv($handle, 1024, "\t");
$complete = array();
while ($row = fgetcsv($handle, 1024, "\t")) {
$complete[] = array_combine($headers, $row);
}
fclose($handle);
$data['data'] = $complete;
file_put_contents($this->json_file,json_encode($data,JSON_PRETTY_PRINT));
}
So the result is I create a CSV file and a JSON file much faster than creating a JSON file alone, and there are no issues with memory limits.

Answer 2

Personally as I said in the comments, I would use CSV files. They have several advantages.
you can read / write one line at a time so you only manage the memory for one line
you can just append new data into the file.
PHP has plenty of built in support using either the fputcsv() or SPL file objects.
you can load them directly into the database using using "Load Data Infile"
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/load-data.html
The only cons are
keep the same schema through the whole file
no nested data structures
The issue with Json, is ( as far as I know ) you have to keep the whole thing in memory as a single data set. Therefor you cannot stream it ( line for line ) like a normal text file. There is really no solution beside limiting the size of the json data, which may or may not even be easy to do. You can increase the memory some, but that is just a temporary fix if you expect the data to continue to grow.
We use CSV files in a production environment and I regularly deal with datasets that are 800k or 1M rows. I've even seen one that was 10M rows. We have a single table of 60M rows ( MySql ) that is populated from CSV uploads. So it will work and be robust.
If your set on Json, then I would just come up with a fixed number of rows that works and design your code to only run that many rows at a time. It's impossible for me to guess how to do that without more details.