Passing javascript objects with brackets as keys to PHP - php

Question

Assume I have this object in JavaScript which is built like this:
var obj = {};
var fields = ['table_name[field_name]', 'tale_name[field_name_2]']
for(var i; i < fields.length; i++){
obj[fields[i]] = someBulkOfData;
}
when logged in the console, obj will output
{
table_name[field_name] : {...},
tabke_name[field_name_2] : {...}
}
This works all fine, until I pass the object through PHP by jQuery.ajax().
When I receive my request in PHP, the array looks as follow:
[
['table_name[field_name'] => ...,
['table_name[field_name_2'] => ...
]
So what happens here is that somewhere between sending the AJAX-request and receiving the data in PHP, the last square bracket of every key dissappears.
Could someone explain to me why this happens, and if there is a neat way to solve this problem?
I have one criteria for the solution, and that is that I cannot change the keys (as in something like 'table_name\[field_name\]').

Answer 1

have you tried using $.serialize()?
use serialize to turn a javascript object into a string that can be transmitted with AJAX easily - like this:
var ajaxableString = $(obj).serialize();

Answer 2

You could solve that issue by restructuring your JS object:
{
table_name : {
field_name_1 : {...},
field_name_2 : {...}
},
another_table : {
...
}
}
That way you avoid that weird naming convention.
Also, I suspect you are hiding something from us. There is something (an operation) between the this and PHP, maybe somewhere in your AJAX code, that you are not telling us. Maybe you are serializing this object into a string and passing the string as one query parameter to the server. This serialize step might be the cause.
But just to be sure, you can check the Net section of the debugger and check the request headers if the data sent is formatted perfectly.
As far as I know, jQuery.ajax accepts a JS object as data, and perfectly converts it into querystrings. By that, you don't need to serialize it manually.

Answer 3

The solution is, thanks to #fab , to encode the data with JSON:
$.ajax({
data : {
obj:JSON.stringify(obj)
},
...
});
In PHP:
json_decode($_REQUEST['obj']);
This will output a perfectly nice stdClass object, with preserved keys.