How to echo JSON doubly nested object literal w/ proper "headers" - php

Question

I'm trying to simply echo a JSON object literal which includes every row in my database table.
As standard with the methods found in many other similar questions I looked at, I'm fetching every row and encoding it like so:
$con=mysqli_connect("localhost","username","pass","markers");//markers is db table name
$result = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT * FROM markers");
$rows = array();
while($r = mysqli_fetch_array($result))
{
$rows[] = $r
//or: $rows[] = array('data' => $r);
}
echo json_encode($rows);
Similarly to the question PHP: can't encode json with multiple rows or mysql table to json ,
I want to echo a JSON Object which looks like this:
{
"data1": // how do I get "data1"?
{
name: John Smith,
title: Mr,
description: a man
}
}
{
"data2":{ // how do I get "data2"?
name:Bob Smith,
title: Mr,
description: another guy
}
}
Except I do not get how to achieve the "headers", the titles of the first level string of objects, such as "data1" or data2". In fact, my database table doesn't necessarily even have those values/that column.
This is what it looks like right now:
How can I get simply numerical "headers" like "1", "2" or "data1", "data2" without having to designate the "name" column as the "headers"? (Or do I have to have a column for that?)
My goal is to process the values in every "row" in the returned JSON.
I plan to use the jQ $.each function $.each(data, function(dataNum, dataInfo) -- e.g. data1 would be passed to dataNum and the values would be passed to dataInfo -- and be able to access specific table values by dataInfo.name, which right now is not working.
Thanks to any help in advance!

Answer 1

I would think you are way better off using mysqli_fetch_object() to get each row as it own object. When you then json_encode $rows you would have an array of objects.
Here is the code:
$con=mysqli_connect("localhost","username","pass","markers");//markers is db table name
$result = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT * FROM markers");
$rows = array();
while($r = mysqli_fetch_object($result))
{
$rows[] = $r;
}
echo json_encode($rows);
Your JSON would look like this:
[
{
"name":"Some Name",
"title":"Some Title",
"description":"Some description"
},
{
"name":"Some Other Name",
"title":"Some Other Title",
"description":"Some other description"
},
...
]
In javascript, that gives you an integer-indexed array of objects. So your javascript might look like this:
var array = JSON.parse(jsonString);
$.each(array, function(key, value) {
alert(key); // numerical index
alert(value.name); // name
alert(value.title); // title
alert(value.description); // description
});

Answer 2

Create indexes in your $rows variable:
<?php
$t['a'] = array ('name' => 'foo');
$t['b'] = array ('name' => 'bar');
echo json_encode ($t);
?>
In your case, a simple integer should do the trick, or something like $rows['data' . $i] followed by a $i++.