My JSON data variables are empty - php

Question

I have JSON data being fed in which I have set manually for debugging purposes. I'm trying to get the data to be stored in to their own variables (for later DB storage), however, they are empty.
I have tried 2 different things yet it's still appearing as empty when echo'ing them out. Is there a better way of doing this and one that will actually store the data in the required variables?
$json = '[{
"q1":"a",
"q2":"d"
}]';
$questions = json_decode($json, true);
$q1 = $questions->q1; //first method of getting the data
$q2 = $questions['q2']; //second attempted method
echo "q1: ".$q1;
echo "q2: ".$q2;

Answer 1

Get rid of the square braces around the json string:
$json = '{
"q1":"a",
"q2":"d"
}';
$questions = json_decode($json, true);
$q1 = $questions['q1']; //first method of getting the data
$q2 = $questions['q2']; //second attempted method
echo "q1: ".$q1;
echo "q2: ".$q2;
Edit: Since you are planning on sending the information over AJAX, say using something like
JSON.stringify($('#formId').serializeArray());
you may end up with an JSON array, as per your original post. In that case, you may want to do a for loop, or access the question directly like so:
$json = '[{
"q1":"a",
"q2":"d"
}]';
$questions = json_decode($json, true);
foreach($questions as $question) {
$q1 = $question['q1']; //first method of getting the data
$q2 = $question['q2']; //second attempted method
}
// This would also work:
echo $questions[0]['q1'];