Php Json Data format

Question

There is a curl POST request example sent via REST JSON.

{"email": "sam@email.com", "items": [{ "name": "api Name", "quantity": 10, "unit_price": 2}, { "name": "api 2", "quantity": "4", "unit_price": 3 }] 

}

How can I format this in PHP.

I have tried the following:

$data = array(
        'email' => 'john@dow.com', 
        );
$data['items'] = array(
        'name' => 'fruits', 'quantity' => 4,
         'unit_price' => 7,
        );

The service just accepts email , and ignores items .

Answer 1

the items array is an array of objects. You are showing an map of strings

Answer 2

An easy trick is to use the PHP function json_decode() to get a PHP data structure that, when passed to json_encode() produces the string you need:

var_export(json_decode(
    '{"email": "sam@email.com", "items": [{ "name": "api Name", "quantity": 10, "unit_price": 2}, { "name": "api 2", "quantity": "4", "unit_price": 3 }]}',
    TRUE
));

produces:

array(
    'email' => 'sam@email.com',
    'items' => array(
        0 => array(
            'name' => 'api Name',
            'quantity' => 10,
            'unit_price' => 2,
        ),
        1 => array(
            'name' => 'api 2',
            'quantity' => '4',
            'unit_price' => 3,
        ),
    ),
)

Pass TRUE as the second argument to get arrays back; without it, json_decode() generates objects instead of associative arrays.

Use function var_export() to get the PHP code that generates the data structure you pass it as argument.

Use the code above in a separate script, to get a hint about the data structure you need to create in order to get the desired string when you encode it as JSON. Don't put it into the product you develop.