Get JSON objects in PHP, not array - php

Question

Im writing a website in php that gets a JSONstring from another php-api Ive created.
The string looks like this:
{
"result": "true",
"results": {
"20": {
"id": "20",
"desc": "a b ct tr",
"active": "1",
"startdate": "2013-04-03",
"starttimehour": "18",
"starttimemin": "0",
"enddate": "2013-04-03",
"endtimehour": "22",
"endtimemin": "0",
"creator": "a"
},
"21": {
"id": "21",
"desc": "test",
"active": "0",
"startdate": "2013-04-04",
"starttimehour": "18",
"starttimemin": "0",
"enddate": "2013-04-04",
"endtimehour": "22",
"endtimemin": "0",
"creator": "a"
}
}
}
Ive found lots of answers on how to get information from a JSONarray but Im not using an array here.
So the question is: how can I get the objects that are labeled 20, 21 and so forth(These numbers are generated by the server so I dont know which ones will be returned).
Or should I rewrite how my api returns the JSON as an array instead. Something like this:
{"result"="true", "results":[{...},{...},{...}]}

Answer 1

$json = json_decode($json_string, True);
foreach($json['results'] as $key => $value) {
// access the number with $key and the associated object with $value
echo 'Number: '.$key;
echo 'Startdate: '.$value['startdate'];
}

Answer 2

I suppose that you are getting the json by POST without any parameter, like
curl http://someapi.somedomain/someresource/ -X POST -d #data.json
so basically
$data = file_get_contents('php://input');
$object = json_decode($data);
print_r($object);
should solve your problem. and $object will be your json object that you post.

Answer 3

You do get the JSON response as a string. That's just the way JSON works. To "convert" the data to a format and structure that is easily accessible, you can use a PHP function called json_decode().
You have two choices when using the function -
To convert the data into an array. json_decode($jsonString,true)
If you use this method, you would access the data like you would for an associative array. $jsonArray['results']['21']
To convert the data into an object. json_decode($jsonString)
With this method, you would use object notation to traverse the data -
$num = 21;
$jsonObj->results->$num

Answer 4

First you decode the string($string) then you can loop through it and get all the properties of the objects. Remember that accessing properties is with ->prop instead of ['prop']. This way you do not have to deal with it in an array manner.
$jsoned = json_decode($string);
foreach($jsoned->results as $o) {
foreach($o as $key => $value) {
echo "The key is: ".$key." and the value is: ".$value."<br>";
}
}
Working example what will print out:
Key is: id and value is: 20
Key is: desc and value is: a b ct tr
Key is: active and value is: 1
etc...