PHP retrieve json values without loop through the whole json object - php

Question

I'm a newbie in the PHP area, so please bear with my question.
Basically I have/will have a pretty big json file, and I need to query the file to get a single entry based on the key provided. An example would be as follow:
{
"key1" : {value1},
"key2" : {value2},
...,
"keyn" : {valuen}
}
I will need to retrieve only one value at any one request, and hope to get a better performance.
The basic way to deal with this sort of handling in PHP from my search is to use json_decode() and then foreach.
However, this approach seems like need to iterate through the whole file based on the order of the key and what the key I am looking for. So if I am looking for keyn, then essentially I have to read from top to bottom of the large file. (Yep, I can use some sort algorithm to get a better result)
But from my understanding, JSON is basically another form of HashMap, so given HashMap can get easily and fast, is there a similar way in PhP to get the best performance out of it?

Answer 1

Well, given the structure you provided you definitely don't need to loop through the entire object.
If you're looking for keyn, you would just do:
$obj = json_decode($input);
echo $obj->keyn;
Maybe I'm missing something obvious. If you want to prevent having to json_decode the entire object, your question makes a bit more sense though... but that's not what you're asking.

Answer 2

From JSON.org
JSON is built on two structures:
A collection of name/value pairs. In various languages, this is realized as an object, >record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array.
An ordered list of values. In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or >sequence.
You can't just interact with json without first using json_decode() to turn it into a usable object. But if you know the keys, after running json_decode() you can interact with it (because it's now an object). for example:
<?php
$string = '{"foo": "bar", "cool": "attr"}';
$result = json_decode($string);
// Result: object(stdClass)#1 (2) { ["foo"]=> string(3) "bar" ["cool"]=> string(4) "attr" }
var_dump($result);
// Prints "bar"
echo $result->foo;
// Prints "attr"
echo $result->cool;
?>
In situations like this, var_dump() and print_r() are your friends.

Answer 3

There really isn't any magical way to find the value without using any kind of loop
I haven't benchmarked this:
This is how I would approach the problem without having to finish the iterating over the whole tree if and when a match is foudn
$key = 'keyn'
$obj = json_decode(file_get_contents('path/to/your/file'), true);
$len = count($obj);
$match = false;
for($ii = 0; $ii < $len; $ii++){
$curr = $obj[$ii];
if($curr == $key) {
$match = $curr;
}
break;
}

Answer 4

In PHP you can use function: file_get_contents to parse JSON file. You have to go through each and every key-value pairs.