up vote 22 down vote favorite
3

I have a PHP script that's being called through jQuery AJAX. I want the PHP script to return the data in JSON format to the javascript. Here's the pseudo code in the PHP script:

$json = "{";
foreach($result as $addr)
{
    foreach($addr as $line)
    {
    	$json .= $line . "\n";
    }
    $json .= "\n\n";
}
$json .= "}";

Basically, I need the results of the two for loops to be inserted in $json.

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3 Answers

up vote 54 down vote accepted

Php has an inbuilt JSON Serialising function.

json_encode

json_encode

Please use that if you can and don't suffer Not Invented Here syndrome.

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1  
Excellent, thank you. I had actually looked this up before posting on SO, but I didn't think it would be available on my hosting. – AquinasTub Mar 25 '09 at 16:14
up vote 22 down vote

There's a JSON section in the PHP's documentation. You'll need PHP 5.2.0 though.

As of PHP 5.2.0, the JSON extension is bundled and compiled into PHP by default.

If you don't, here's the PECL library you can install.

<?php
    $arr = array ('a'=>1,'b'=>2,'c'=>3,'d'=>4,'e'=>5);

    echo json_encode($arr); // {"a":1,"b":2,"c":3,"d":4,"e":5}
?>
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1  
+1 great explanation – user1432124 Jun 20 '12 at 11:25
up vote 5 down vote

Usually you would be interested in also having some structure to your data in the receiving end:

json_encode($result)

This will preserve the array keys as well.

Do remember that json_encode only works on utf8 -encoded data.

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