Get information from JSON - php

Question

So currently I am doing this..
function get_info($data)
{
$json = file_get_contents("http://site.com/".$data.".json");
$output = json_decode($json, true);
return $output;
}
which is fine and returns everything like this:
array(1) { ["allocation"]=> array(20) { ["carrier_ocn"]=> string(4) "6664" ["available_on"]=> NULL ["status"]=> string(9) "allocated" ["access_type"]=> string(8) "wireless" ["ratecenter"]=> string(9) "CHARLOTTE" ["lat"]=> float(35.2270869) ["contaminations"]=> NULL ["city"]=> string(9) "CHARLOTTE" ["lng"]=> float(-80.8431267) ["current_on"]=> string(10) "2010-04-28" ["block_code"]=> NULL ["npa"]=> int(704) ["geo_precision"]=> int(4) ["nxx"]=> int(291) ["assigned_on"]=> NULL ["country"]=> string(2) "US" ["region"]=> string(2) "NC" ["ratecenter_formatted"]=> string(9) "Charlotte" ["carrier"]=> string(20) "SPRINT SPECTRUM L.P." ["effective_on"]=> NULL } }
How can I make that return only selected values like "ratecenter_formatted". I just want to get "Charlotte" from the above dump. How would I do this?
Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Hmmm, just fish it out from the array? json_decode() on a JSON array will give you a PHP array that you can use just like any other array in PHP (in this case an associative one).
$output = get_info($data);
echo $output['allocation']['ratecenter_formatted'];

Answer 2

You would still need to decode the entire JSON string to get single values from it, there's no way to decode only certain values.
You could just return the values you want in the php function:
function get_info($data)
{
$json = file_get_contents("http://site.com/".$data.".json");
$output = json_decode($json, true);
return array(
'ratecenter_formatted' => $output['allocation']['ratecenter_formatted']
);
}