Loop a foreach json loop in another foreach json loop - php

Question

I'm at a 24 hour hackathon trying to solve this so, excuse if it's a little rushed.
1st for each loop works fine, I'm getting a list of categories from this url
https://dev.xola.com/api/categories
I grab the list with this
$fullurl = "https://dev.xola.com/api/categories";
$string .= file_get_contents($fullurl); // get json content
$json_a = json_decode($string, true); //json decoder
then loop it with this
<?
foreach($json_a as $v)
{?>
echo $v ?}>
Now with the second for each look, I want to grab the items from this url
https://dev.xola.com/api/experiences
that match the category from the last url
so samething
$fullurl = "https://dev.xola.com/api/categories";
$string .= file_get_contents($fullurl); // get json content
$json_b = json_decode($string, true); //json decoder
here's the complete loop I tried
<?
$i=0;
foreach($json_a as $v)
$i++
{?>
echo $v ?
foreach($json_b as $x){?>
if($v==$x):
echo $v
endif;
?>
}?>

Answer 1

This will create a $result array with only the data that had the categories early acquired:
<?php
$categories_url = "https://dev.xola.com/api/categories";
$data = file_get_contents($categories_url);
$categories = json_decode($data, true);
$experiences_url = "https://dev.xola.com/api/experiences";
$data = file_get_contents($experiences_url);
$experiences = json_decode($data, true);
$result = array();
foreach ($experiences['data'] as $experience)
{
if (in_array($experience['category'], $categories))
{
$result[] = $experience;
}
}
print_r($result);
And you can easily read the result with:
foreach ($result as $item)
{
echo $item['category'], "\n";
echo $item['desc'], "\n";
//... other data available ...
}

Answer 2

The data structure of the experiences JSON is not the same as the categories JSON, therefore if($v==$x) will never match. If you want to find all results in experiences with a category from the categories url you can do the following:
<?
$BASE_URL = 'https://dev.xola.com/api/';
$categories = json_decode(file_get_contents($BASE_URL . 'categories'));
$experiences = json_decode(file_get_contents($BASE_URL . 'experiences'));
$matches = array();
foreach( $categories as $category ) {
foreach( $experiences->data as $experience ) {
if( $experience->category === $category ) {
$matches[] = $experience;
}
}
}
?>
<? foreach( $matches as $match ) : ?>
<? echo $match->category; ?><br>
<? endforeach; ?>