- How to extract and access JSON data in PHP
- How to receive JSON data in PHP
- 1. From a POST or GET request
- 2. Reading a JSON file
- Extracting/Decoding JSON data in PHP
- 1. Accessing JSON data as a PHP object
- 2. Accessing JSON data as an array
- 3. Accessing data in a nested JSON object
- Looping through an object of objects with foreach()
- Conclusion
- Related Articles
- Get JSON from URL in PHP
- How to Get JSON from URL in PHP
- PHP Get, Write, Read, Load, JSON Data from URL
- How to Get, Write, Read, Load, JSON Data from URL in PHP
- 1. PHP read JSON file From URL
- 2. Get JSON File Data From URL in PHP & Convert JSON to Array PHP
- 3. Convert JSON to Object PHP
- 4. PHP write or save JSON to a JSON file
- 5. Loading JSON Data from a File in PHP
- Conclusion
- Recommended PHP Tutorials
- Author Admin
How to extract and access JSON data in PHP
JavaScript Object Notation(JSON) is a lightweight human-readable text format for storing and transporting data consisting of name-value pairs and arrays.
It is easy to generate and parse in many programming languages. It is the most popular and lightweight data-interchange format for web applications and the de-facto format for the data exchange in RESTful web services requests and responses.
In this post, we will cover how to decode a JSON object and access its data in PHP.
Below is an example of a simple JSON object:
How to receive JSON data in PHP
1. From a POST or GET request
To receive JSON data as a POST request, we use the “php://input” along with the function file_get_contents() as below:
For instance, the JSON data is sent below as a POST request:
'; $curl = curl_init(); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type:application/json')); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payload); curl_exec($curl); curl_close($curl);
To receive the above request data in the register.php file, just add file_get_contents(«php://input») and assign it to a variable for processing eg:
2. Reading a JSON file
A JSON file contains a JSON object and has a file extension of .json. You can as well open the file in PHP and access its data.
Similar to POST or GET request, we use file_get_contents() but instead of having “php://input”, we use the file path.
For example, if we have a JSON file with path «https://www.example.com/mydata.json«, we can access its data as below:
If the json file and the PHP file accessing it are in the same website, we can use relative path instead of the full file URL.
Extracting/Decoding JSON data in PHP
We use the built-in function json_decode() to convert the JSON string to the appropriate data type such as an object or an array.
1. Accessing JSON data as a PHP object
By default the json_decode() function returns an object.
Example
The example below decodes a JSON object into a PHP object:
'; $data = json_decode($json); var_dump($data);
The above example outputs below:
object(stdClass)#1 (4) < ["firstName"]=>string(4) «John» [«lastName»]=> string(3) «Doe» [«email»]=> string(17) «johndoe@gmail.com» [«phone»]=> string(12) «111-111-1111» >
To access the PHP object data, you use the object operator (->) after the object name, followed by the key of the key-value pair. This is the same as the name in the name-value pair in JSON object eg $data->firstName .
'; $data = json_decode($json); echo "My name is".$data->firstName." ".$data->lastName; //Output: My name is John Doe
2. Accessing JSON data as an array
You can as well convert the JSON object to a PHP associative array by passing a second(optional) parameter in the json_decode() function with the boolean value «true» as below. The value is set to false by default if you don’t pass it.
The example below decodes JSON object into a PHP associative array:
'; $data = json_decode($json, true); var_dump($data);
The above example outputs below:
array(4) < ["firstName"]=>string(4) «John» [«lastName»]=> string(3) «Doe» [«email»]=> string(17) «johndoe@gmail.com» [«phone»]=> string(12) «111-111-1111» >
You access the data as in any other PHP associative array as in the example below:
'; $data = json_decode($json, true); echo "My name is ".$data["firstName"]." ".$data["lastName"]; //Output: My name is John Doe
3. Accessing data in a nested JSON object
A JSON object may comprise of json objects and arrays as the values in its name-value pairs such as in the example below:
In the above example, the «address» has an object as its value while «siblings» has an array value comprising of objects.
The easiest way of accessing all the data is decoding the object as an associative array.
, "siblings": [ < "name": "Joseph Doe" >, < "name": "Mary Doe" >] >'; $data = json_decode($json, true); //Displaying all the data echo "First Name: ".$data["firstName"]."
"; //Output -> First Name: John echo "First Name: ".$data["lastName"]."
"; //Output -> Last Name: Doe echo "Email Address: ".$data["email"]."
"; //Output -> Email Address: johndoe@gmail.com echo "Postal Address: ".$data["address"]["postalAddress"]."
"; //Output -> Postal Address: 12345 echo "Postal Code: ".$data["address"]["postalCode"]."
"; //Output -> Postal Code: 5432 echo "City: ".$data["address"]["city"]."
"; //Output -> City: Nairobi echo "Sibling 1: ".$data["siblings"][0]["name"]."
"; //Output -> Sibling 1: Joseph Doe echo "Sibling 2: ".$data["siblings"][1]["name"]."
"; //Output -> Sibling 2: Mary Doe
Looping through an object of objects with foreach()
You may have a large JSON object made of an array of objects, like in the example below:
To access the values of a country in the example above, you just have to know its object position in the array. For example, china is in the third position. But when accessing the array items, we start counting from 0, hence the index of China in the array is 2.
We access the China array object as below:
"; //Output -> Country: China echo "Code: ".$data["countries"][2]["code"]."
"; //Output -> Code: CN echo "City: ".$data["countries"][2]["city"]."
"; //Output -> City: Beijing
If you want to access all the array data then it can be tiresome and time-consuming to write the code for accessing each at a time especially when the object is large. For such an instance, you can use the foreach() function to loop through all the objects as below:
, < "name": "India", "code": "IN", "city": "New Delhi" >, < "name": "China", "code": "CN", "city": "Beijing" >, < "name": "Germany", "code": "DE", "city": "Berlin" >, < "name": "Kenya", "code": "KE", "city": "Nairobi" >] >'; $countries = json_decode($json)->countries; foreach($countries as $country)< echo "Country: ".$country->name."
"; echo "Code: ".$country->code."
"; echo "City: ".$country->city."
"; >
Conclusion
In this post, we have covered everything you need to know in extracting and accessing a JSON object data using PHP.
If you want to get notified via email when we add more incredible content to our blog, kindly subscribe to our email newsletter.
Related Articles
Get JSON from URL in PHP
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to get json from url in php script. JSON has become a popular way to exchange data and web services outputs in json format. To send a HTTP request and parse JSON response from URL is fairly simple in php but newbies may find how to parse json difficult.
Let’s see how to build a php json parser script. For this script, I’m going to access Google MAP web service via API and get latitude and longitude co-ordinates for a location. Google map api produces both json/xml output. But for this example I’m going to get the json response and show you how to parse json object to retrieve the geo-metric details.
How to Get JSON from URL in PHP
This is the php script to read the json data from url.
results[0]->geometry->location->lat; $lng = $json->results[0]->geometry->location->lng; echo "Latitude: " . $lat . ", Longitude: " . $lng; // output // Latitude: 40.6781784, Longitude: -73.9441579 ?>
The above php script sends a HTTP request to Google MAP web service along with a parameter containing a physical address. The API in turn returns the geometric co-ordinates for the address as json string — which we further decode into a php object and parse it to retrieve the latitude and longitude details.
The php function file_get_contents($url) send a http request to the provided url and returns json data.
The function json_decode($json) decodes the provided json string and returns as a PHP object.
As simple as that you can parse json response. That was all about getting json from url in php.
PHP Get, Write, Read, Load, JSON Data from URL
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data interchange format that is widely used in web development. In PHP, we can easily retrieve, write, read, load JSON data from a URL using various built-in functions and libraries. In this article, you will learn how to perform these operations in PHP.
How to Get, Write, Read, Load, JSON Data from URL in PHP
- 1. PHP read JSON file From URL
- 2. Get JSON File Data From URL in PHP & Convert JSON to Array PHP
- 3. Convert JSON to Object PHP
- 4. PHP write or save JSON to a JSON file
- Loading JSON Data from a File in PHP
1. PHP read JSON file From URL
You can use the PHP file_get_contents() function that is used to get or read or load file from the given path (Url or Source).
To get JSON data from a URL in PHP, we can use the “file_get_contents” function along with the “json_decode” function. Here’s an example:
$filename = 'data.json'; $data = file_get_contents($filename); $jsonData = json_decode($data);
In this code snippet, you first specify the filename of the JSON data that we want to read. Then, you use the “file_get_contents” function to retrieve the data from the file. Finally, you use the “json_decode” function to convert the JSON data into a PHP object.
2. Get JSON File Data From URL in PHP & Convert JSON to Array PHP
- File get_get_conents() get that is used to get or read file from the given path (Url or Source).
- json_decode() function of PHP, which is used to convert JSON file contents to PHP Array
$url = 'https://example.com/data.json'; $data = file_get_contents($url); $jsonData = json_decode($data);
In this code snippet, you first specify the URL of the JSON data that you want to retrieve. Then, you use the “file_get_contents” function to retrieve the data from the URL. Finally, you use the “json_decode” function to convert the JSON data into a PHP object.
3. Convert JSON to Object PHP
You can convert JSON file data to the PHP objects. You can use the json_decode() without passing the TRUE in it. Because by default, the PHP json_decode function will convert the JSON data into an object.
4. PHP write or save JSON to a JSON file
You can use the file_put_contents() function of PHP, which is used to write or save data from a given path of the JSON file or text file.
$url = 'https://example.com/data.json'; $data = array('name' => 'John Doe', 'age' => 30, 'city' => 'New York'); $jsonData = json_encode($data); $ch = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'PUT'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $jsonData); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $response = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); echo $response;
In this code snippet, you first specify the URL of the JSON data that we want to write to. Then, you create an array of data that you want to write to the URL and convert it into a JSON string using the “json_encode” function. Then, you use the “curl_init” function to initialize a curl session, set the request method to PUT, and set the JSON data as the request payload. Finally, you execute the curl session, retrieve the response, and close the session.
5. Loading JSON Data from a File in PHP
To load JSON data from a file in PHP, we can use the “json_decode” function. Here’s an example:
$filename = 'data.json'; $data = file_get_contents($filename); $jsonData = json_decode($data);
In this code snippet, you first specify the filename of the JSON data that you want to load. Then, you use the “file_get_contents” function to retrieve the data from the file. Finally, you use the “json_decode” function to convert the JSON data into a PHP object.
Conclusion
JSON data is a popular data interchange format in web development. In PHP, you can easily retrieve, write, read, and load JSON data from a URL or a file using various built-in functions and libraries. By understanding these techniques, developers can leverage the power of JSON data in their PHP applications.
Recommended PHP Tutorials
Author Admin
My name is Devendra Dode. I am a full-stack developer, entrepreneur, and owner of Tutsmake.com. I like writing tutorials and tips that can help other developers. I share tutorials of PHP, Python, Javascript, JQuery, Laravel, Livewire, Codeigniter, Node JS, Express JS, Vue JS, Angular JS, React Js, MySQL, MongoDB, REST APIs, Windows, Xampp, Linux, Ubuntu, Amazon AWS, Composer, SEO, WordPress, SSL and Bootstrap from a starting stage. As well as demo example.