Using MYSQL query data with jQuery Autocomplete - php

Question

I'm trying to query data with MYSQL,
then link it to an <input> with jQuery's Autocomplete.
I'm still not used to using PHP inside Javascript, so I'm not sure how to get contents
inside an array. When every I console.log my PHP for debugging, it says Array.
Here is my JS code:
var SOMETHING = ["<?php echo $SOMETHING; ?>"];
//console.log(SOMETHING);
$( "#input_add_album" ).autocomplete({
source: SOMETHING
});
Here is my PHP code:
global $SOMETHING;
$SOMETHING = array();
$sql = "
select B from A
";
$stmt = $dbh->query($sql);
$result = $stmt->fetchAll();
foreach ($result as $SOME_CONTENT) {
array_push($SOMETHING, $SOME_CONTENT["SOME_CONTENT"]);
}

Answer 1

This question is old but I'm going to go over the 2 most likely solutions. The problem your having is that your trying to echo an Array to see it's contents and that isn't possible. It's also not possible for the JavaScript interpreter to interpret PHP. PHP processes .php files on your host and then serves them to the clients machine. The client end should never see any PHP, it would not know what to do with it. So the end result after the PHP files are run from server, must be a well formatted document to fit the guidelines of a file type the browser can handle, in this case html and JavaScript. So then in order to log the contents of a PHP variable to the console with JavaScript, it must be in a form JavaScript understands. Luckily for you, there is a format that JavaScript understands and most other languages support. The way to move any string, number, array or associative array to JS is with JSON. JavaScript Object Notation. Just remember, that associative arrays in PHP become objects in JavaScript.
$regular_array = json_encode(array( 'words', 'to', 'send' ));
$php_assoc = json_encode(array(
'assoc' => 'arrays',
'become' => 'JavaScript',
'objects' => array(
'this','will','be',1,array()
),
));
echo "
<script>
/** Check that window.console.logs isn't undefined, if we were just
* using JavaScript I wouldn't be so verbose. Since our PHP variable is
* traveling so far from home, I want to make sure we get the right address
*/
if (window && 'console' in window ) {
window.console.log({$regular_array});
window.console.log('JS object with array inside', {$php_assoc});
}
</script>";
That will log the values out to the browsers console. It would be the equivalent of logging the following array and object to the console with regular old JavaScript.
var regularArray = [ 'words', 'to', 'send' ];
var phpAssoc = {
assoc : 'arrays',
become : 'JavaScript',
objects : [ 'this', 'will', 'be', 1, [] ]
};
In Google Chrome, the phpAssoc object looks like this in the console. It can be fully expanded, looked through, and used like any other JavaScript object.
Object {assoc: "arrays", become: "JavaScript", objects: Array[5]}
*In this example I didn't save the PHP output into a JavaScript variable, but you can see how to inject the value into console.log so you can do the same exact thing with echo "var something = {$some_other_thing};";