How do I retrieve a JSON encoded array printed inside a <div> from a JavaScript file?

Question

I know that this question might have been asked like 100 times, but, believe me, I checked a lot for already asked questions and I could not find a proper answer for my case.

Basically what I would like to do is pass an array my PHP code is generating to a separate JavaScript file which will do something with it. Nothing new untill now, I suppose, so let me give you some clarification specific for my case. Let's say I am a bit ahead.

I found many answers that suggested to just pass the encoded version of my array echoing it out inside my PHP file and then retreiving it from the separate JavaScript file.

I was going to use this method but what I encountered is that I can't go for getJSON() method because I have my encoded array inside a PHP file that outputs something more that just that.

So my final question would be: How can I retrieve, from my separate JavaScript file, my json_encoded version of the array from my PHP file?

And note again that I have my array echoed inside a (occasionally made style="visibility:hidden" for the purpose of not showing it to the user).

Thanks in advance

EDIT: Ok thanks for the answers. Probably i wasnt clear enough with all the details.

My program is made up of, let's say, 3 files.

1)HTML file with a form and a submit button->action send the data to the php file i was mentioning.

<form name="foo" action="foo.php" method="GET">
<input type="text" name="footext"/>
<input type="submit" value="Send Data"/>

2)PHP file which get the data from the previous form, process it and ultimately create the array i have to take into consideration

something that uses the $_GET['footext'] and produces $array in the end and of course, as i metioned earlier I was trying to solve this with

echo "<div style=\"display:none\">" . json_encode($array) . "</div>";

3)JS file which does something else, or will do, considering that everything in thit script is based on what i retrieve from my php array.

here i prepared some functions and tested them with a static array but what i need is to, obviously, retrieve $array from the previous file and use it instead of a bogus one

Answer 1

There are two solutions for this problem. First is to put that array/json-encoding generation code in another PHP file and get it via AJAX (getJSON) separately. Second is to put the contents of the output in a pre-processed format for Jquery, hide it in an random element and get its contents via jQuery selector. The first one is more simple and elegant, I'd implement it.