PHP encode JSON (2 dimensional array)

Question

I am querying a table that return to fields(message_type & percentage). I use PHP to encode the json data, here is how i do it

$json = array();
while ($row = odbc_fetch_array($rs)) {
  $json[][] = $row;
}
echo json_encode($json);

output :

[ [ { "message_type" : "bullying",
      "percentage" : "60"
    } ],
  [ { "message_type" : "cheating",
      "percentage" : " 14"
    } ],
  [ { "message_type" : "Stress",
      "percentage" : "16"
    } ],
  [ { "message_type" : "Gang",
      "percentage" : "7"
    } ]
]

As you can see json_encode function is adding curly braces, quotes and the object key name.

What I want is to parse the json as two dimensional array only, here is the desired output:

[
  ["bullying", 60],
  ["harrassment", 9],
  ["cheating", 14],
  ["Stress", 16],
  ["Gang", 7]
]

I also tried to encode it manually but I could not get the result I need.

@DaveRandom you solved my problem if you add it as an answer I will accept — meda
– meda, Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 23:27

DaveRandom · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-09 23:38:23Z

8

PHP's json_encode() uses a certain amount of magic to determine whether a given vector is encoded as a JSON object or an array, but the simple rule is this: If the array has contiguous, zero-indexed, numeric keys, it will be encoded as an array. Any other vector (object or associative array) will be encoded as an object.

Because you are using odbc_fetch_array(), your result rows are returned as an associative array with the keys being the column names. To get the result you want you have 3 options:

Pass the result rows through array_values():

$json[] = array_values($row);

Manually construct the individual arrays:

$json[] = array($row['message_type'], $row['percentage']);

Or probably the best option is to use odbc_fetch_row() instead, which will return indexed arrays straight away:

while ($row = odbc_fetch_row($rs)) {
    $json[] = $row;
}

answered Apr 9, 2013 at 23:38

DaveRandom

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4 Comments

meda Over a year ago

Thanks this solved my problem , thanks for the detail answer. I also noticed json_encode remove the leading zero if the value is less than 1, for example 0.23 ---> .23 how do I avoid that?

DaveRandom Over a year ago

@meda That wouldn't happen if the data was a float and json_encode() wouldn't do it at all, I suspect it's odbc that's doing that (although it's pretty odd behaviour for any environment). Can you show a var_dump($json); just before the json_encode() call?

meda Over a year ago

here is one of the array before the encoding [12]=>array(2) { [0]=> string(17) "Sexual Harrasment[1]=>string(12) ".16638935100"}

DaveRandom Over a year ago

@meda Yes, you can see that the leading zero has already been stripped off before it is passed to JSON. What is the data type of the percentage column in the database?

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