Problems When Grabbing Information in JSON File (PHP)

Question

So I am trying to just grab some data from a json file in php which should be simple but is not working

$url = 'http://www.vam.ac.uk/api/json/museumobject';
$contents = array(file_get_contents($url));
var_dump($contents);

this returns the contents of the file.

Whenever I try to grab data it doesn't work.

 var_dump($contents[0].records.[0].object);

this returns the whole file.

Any suggestions to return just one piece of information in this json file: http://www.vam.ac.uk/api/json/museumobject

Answer 1

Try JSON decoding :

$contents = json_decode(file_get_contents($url));  

// var_dump($contents);

print_r ($contents->records[0]);
print_r ($contents->records[0]->fields);

Answer 2

Use json_decode and then pass true to have it return an associative array if that's needed. Source

$contents = json_decode(file_get_contents($url), true);  
$contents[0]->name

Then your $contents will be accessible as an array and name is an attribute of your object you would like to access.