Passing PHP array into a Javascript array without AJAX or JQuery?

Question

I have a bunch of parallel arrays in php

$phoneNums = array();
$minutesUsed = array();
$plans = array();
$charges = array();

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and I'm trying to put them in arrays in JS so I can access them and print values into the page

var phoneNums = <?php echo $phoneNums ?>;
var minutesUsed = <?php echo $minutesUsed ?>;
var plans = <?php echo $plans ?>;
var charge = <?php echo $charges ?>;

What ends up happening is my values end up as undefined. How would I pass an array from php to js this without using AJAX or JQuery?

Answer 1

Echoing a PHP array will not print its contents. Even if it would, it would not be in the same format that Javascript expects ( [1,2,3] ) - also, associative arrays in PHP work quite differently than JS, where they are objects ( {'x':1,'y':2} ).

JSON is Javascript Object Notation. If you encode your data in JSON (in PHP, you can use json_encode() to do that), it will be absolutely acceptable for Javascript, so you can simply print it:

var phoneNums = <?php echo json_encode($phoneNums); ?>;

Demo