JSON is the modern data format used in "AJAX" applications. As the leading language for the Web PHP course has support for handling JSON data: You can pass any data to json_encode() and the function will create a JSON representation of this data:
[php]
<?php
echo json_encode(array(1,2,3,4));
?>
[1,2,3,4]This also works for objects:
[php]
<?php
$o = new stdclass;
$o->a = 42;
echo json_encode($o);
?>
{"a":42}Wonderful. But the world isn't that easy. For many PHP objects the JSON-representation of the data is a bit more complex.for instance what about private properties or maybe you want to calculate some inner values? - In PHP 5.3 you were on your own. but thanks to Sara there's hope in sight: the new interface JsonSerializable. Classes implementing this interface have to provide a method jsonSerialize() which will be called by json_encode() and has to return a JSON-compatible representation of the data by doing whatever you want. So let's take a look:
[php]
<?php
class JsonTest implements JsonSerializable {
private $a, $b;
public function __construct($a, $b) {
$this->a = $a;
$this->b = $b;
}
public function jsonSerialize() {
return $this->a + $this->b;
}
}
echo json_encode(new JsonTest(23, 42));
?>
65Now this example in itself is of course useless, but let's create a bigger structure, which includes a few of these objects:
[php]
<?php
$data = array(
new stdClass();
new JsonTest(1,2),
new JsonTest(3,4),
array(5,6)
);
echo json_encode($data);
?>
[{},3,7,[5,6]][/php]
Of course you'd usually have more complex serialization logic, but that's left to you.
Now almost certainly somebody will ask "and what about the other way round?" - The only answer there is: Sorry there we can't do much. JSON doesn't encode and meta-information so our generic parser in json_decode() can't do anything special. But anyways: The new interface will certainly be useful.
