Problems manipulating JSON data in PHP - php

Question

I'm not that handy with JSON so here goes. I'm receiving Amazon SNS notifications for bouncing email addresses to a listener (in PHP 5.5) which does:
$post = #file_get_contents("php://input");
$object = json_decode($post, true);
This gives me:
Type => Notification
MessageId => #####
TopicArn => #####
Message => {
"notificationType":"Bounce",
"bounce": {
"bounceSubType":"General",
"bounceType":"Permanent",
"bouncedRecipients":[{"status":"5.3.0","action":"failed","diagnosticCode":"smtp; 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (testuser#yahoo.com) [0] - mta1217.mail.bf1.yahoo.com","emailAddress":"testuser#yahoo.com"}],
"reportingMTA":"dsn; ######",
"timestamp":"2014-10-27T16:37:42.136Z",
"feedbackId":"######"
},
"mail": {
"timestamp":"2014-10-27T16:37:40.000Z",
"source":"myemail#mydomain.com",
"messageId":"######",
"destination":["testuser#yahoo.com"]
}
}
I was expecting an associative array all the way down but instead it's an array only at the top level and with JSON strings inside. I've tried everything I can think of, including json_decoding further parts of the array, but I'm struggling to access the data in a simple way. What I need is the "destination" email address which should be in $object['Message']['mail']['destination'][0].
Can anyone point out what I'm doing wrong here? Thanks.

Answer 1

It looks like $object['Message'] is also json encoded. Perhaps because it's using some generic container format for service call results. Try this
$post = #file_get_contents("php://input");
$object = json_decode($post, true);
//Message contains a json string
$object['Message'] = json_decode($object['Message'], true);
//Then access the structure using array notation
echo $object['Message']['mail']['destination'][0];