PHP: Assign array to variable

Question

i've tried a lot of things to achieve this but none of them seem to work. Im using PHP 7.4

Let's say i have this:

 $othervar = array(); $var = array(1, 2, 3); $othervar = $var;

THIS doesn't work for me, var_dump($othervar) returns

array(1) { [0]=> string(5) "Array" }

I've tried using array_push, i DON'T WANT to use array_merge because i need to assign two arrays to one variable. This is what i need to do:

 $variable = array(); $variable["type1"] = $data; //Array 1 $variable["type2"] = $otherData; //Array 2

This doesn't work either.

Barmar showed me here that this works so i must be doing it wrong somewhere else.

I'll explan the whole code:

To login to my webpage, i send a request trough AJAX request with jQuery.

function SendData(data, btn, actionOnSuccess, shouldReplace = false, elementToReplace = "", getServerData = true, htmlData = "") {
    if (!loading)
    {
        ToggleLoading();
        data.push({name: "action", value: $(btn).data("action")});
        data.push({name: "attr", value: JSON.stringify($(btn).data("attr"))});
        $.post("SendRequest.php", data)
            .done(function (r) {
                if (!r.success)
                    //ajax sent and received but it has an error
                else
                    //ajax sent and it was successfull
            })
            .fail(function () {
                //ajax call failed
            });
    }
    else {
        //This determines if some request is already executing or not.
    }
}

"action" and "attr" are encrypted values that i send to reference some actions on the system (i'll show more here):

The code goes from AJAX to SendRequest.php where it executes an action let's say, login.

The first lines of SendRequest.php are:

    require "Functions.php";

    $apiAction = Decrypt($_POST["action"]); //Action
    $actionData = json_decode(Decrypt($_POST["attr"])); //Attr
    $finalPost = $_POST;
    foreach ($actionData as $key => $value) { $finalPost[$key] = $value; }

    $finalPost["loggedin_ip"] = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    $result = APICall($apiAction, $finalPost);

Then, this is what i want to achieve to communicate with my API:

function APICall($option, $data = array())
{
    session_start();
    $post = array("uData" => ArrayToAPI($_SESSION), "uPost" => ArrayToAPI($data));

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apiurl?" . $option); //option is the ACTION to perform on API (let's say "login") it is an encrypted word on a data-attr atribute on every form/button that creates a communication with API.
    $returned = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);
    $newData = json_decode($returned, true);
    return $newData;
}

function ArrayToAPI($array)
{
    $toApiData = array();
    foreach ($array as $key=>$value) {
        if (is_array($value))
            $toApiData[$key] = ArrayToAPI($value);
        else
            $toApiData[$key] = Encrypt($value);
    }
    return $toApiData;
}

This is what i have on API side:

ob_start();
var_dump($_POST);
$result = ob_get_clean();
$api->EndRequest(false, array("errorDesc" => "a - " . $result));

function EndRequest(bool $task_completed, array $data = array())
{
    $jsonData = array();
    $jsonData['success'] = $task_completed;
    $jsonData['data'] = $data;
    header('Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8');
    echo json_encode($jsonData, JSON_FORCE_OBJECT);
    exit;
}

This ALWAYS returns

array(2) { ["uData"]=> string(5) "Array" ["uPost"]=> string(5) "Array" }

I hope im more clear now, thanks.

Answer 1

The problem is with the request being sent out from your code because of this line:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post); 

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS doesn't support multi-level arrays. Your array values (which the keys are pointing to) are cast to string, which ends up as Array . Use:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($post));

.. instead to "properly" serialize multidimensional arrays in a post request ("properly" as there are many ways to do just that, but it matches the expected PHP format - with [] to denote arrays).