PHP string to array conversion error

Question

I have a php string $data .
on echo $data; I get

{"_index":"movies","_type":"movie","_id":"4","_version":10,"created":false}

I want the string to split in array. So that,

$data["_index"]=movies etc.

I tried $data=array($data); but got Array ( [0] => {"_index":"movies","_type":"movie","_id":"4","_version":10,"created":false} )

How to correctly obtain array.

Answer 1

That is JSON. Just use json_decode :

$array = json_decode($data, true);
print_r($array);