CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjson
Curtis Crewe
Curtis Crewe

Reputation: 4336

How to add square braces around subarray data inside of a json encoded string?

When trying to access an API the JSON array must be parsed like this

{"item":[{"id":"123456", "name":"adam"}]}

But when i'm doing the following code

$data = array("item" => array("id" => "123456", "name" => "adam"));
echo json_encode($data);

it returns the json array without squared brackets as follows

{"item":{"id":"123456","name":"adam"}}

I've spent hours trying to figure out how to fix this and just can't think of a solution

Upvotes: 38

Views: 48630

Answers (3)

Dards
Dards

Reputation: 101

It become handy when using this way, so you can add more items on the array

$val = array();
$val["id"]="123456";
$val["name"]="adam";

$data = array();
$data["item"][]=$val;

echo json_encode($data);

And it will ouput below:

{"item":[{"id":"123456", "name":"adam"}]}

Upvotes: 3

Chad
Chad

Reputation: 703

Before reading this post, I had this:

echo json_encode($data);

After reading this post:

echo json_encode(array($data));

Brackets appeared at the start and end of the JSON object.

Upvotes: 9

Jon
Jon

Reputation: 437684

You need to wrap things in another array:

$data = array("item" => array(array("id" => "123456", "name" => "adam")));

This will be more understandable if we use the equivalent PHP 5.4 array syntax:

$data = [ "item" => [ ["id" => "123456", "name" => "adam"] ] ];

Compare this with the JSON:

        { "item":   [ {"id":"123456", "name":"adam"      } ] }

The only thing to explain is why one of the PHP arrays remains an array [] in JSON while the other two get converted to an object {}. But the documentation already does so:

When encoding an array, if the keys are not a continuous numeric sequence starting from 0, all keys are encoded as strings, and specified explicitly for each key-value pair.

Upvotes: 75

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