Pro PHP- Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More

CHAPTER 18 ■ AJAX AND JSON^275

The usage of these functions is straightforward, as demonstrated in Listing 18-1.

Listing 18-1. JSON Encoding/Decoding

$original = array('key'=>'value', 'key2'=>'value2');

$json = json_encode($original);

$restored = json_decode($json, true);

print_r($original);

print "\n". $json ."\n\n";

print_r($restored);

Array

(

[key] => value

[key2] => value2

)

{"key":"value","key2":"value2"}

Array

(

[key] => value

[key2] => value2

)

JSON in the Zend Framework.

The Zend Framework provides a wrapper to the JSON extension, but also contains a fallback for

systems that do not have the JSON extension enabled (typically installations older than PHP 5.2).

The functionality for the Zend Framework JSON system is provided through the Zend_Json

class and the following methods:

string Zend_Json::encode(mixed $value): This method is an alias of json_encode and

provides the same functionality.

mixed Zend_Json::decode(string $json [, int $decodeType = Zend_Json::TYPE_ARRAY]):

Unlike the json_decode function, the default mechanism for Zend_Json is to try to turn an

object into an associative array. You can pass the constant Zend_Json::TYPE_OBJECT as the

$decodeType parameter to override this behavior and return an object instead of an asso-

ciative array.

See Listing 16-12 in Chapter 16 for an example of using Zend_Json.

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