PHP/JSON Array - From iTunes - php

Question

I've just started out learning PHP/JSON and I've kind of worked out how to output an array from an json file. My aim is to output all the album titles in <li>'s (in this case they are called collectionName in the json file). I think I maybe going about it the wrong way though.
$artistId = '644708';
$otherAlbumsURL = 'http://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id='. $artistId .'&entity=album';
$a = (array)json_decode(file_get_contents($otherAlbumsURL));
var_dump($a);

Answer 1

If you want an array, just use:
$a = json_decode(file_get_contents($otherAlbumsURL), true);
var_dump($a);
Setting the second parameter in json_decode to TRUE will give you an associative array instead of an object.
Judging from the response of the URL, you'll need to loop through the result like this in order to get any available collection names (the first array element doesn't contain a collection name because it is information about the artist. i.e. it isn't an album):
$artistInfo = $a['results'][0]; //Assign artist info to its own variable.
unset($a['results'][0]); //Delete artist info from the array.
//Loop through the results
foreach($a['results'] as $result){
//$result['collectionName'] has the collection name.
echo $result['collectionName'] . '<br>';
}