JSON to PHP Array

Question

What is the PHP array definition of this JSON:

[
 ['id' => 1, 'name' => 'TV & Home Theather'],
 ['id' => 2, 'name' => 'Tablets & E-Readers'],
 ['id' => 3, 'name' => 'Computers', 'children' => [
 ['id' => 4, 'name' => 'Laptops', 'children' => [
 ['id' => 5, 'name' => 'PC Laptops'],
 ['id' => 6, 'name' => 'Macbooks (Air/Pro)']
 ]],
 ['id' => 7, 'name' => 'Desktops'],
 ['id' => 8, 'name' => 'Monitors']
 ]],
 ['id' => 9, 'name' => 'Cell Phones']
];

Something like this outputs curly braces, which is not what I want:

$foo = array(array('id' => 1, 'name' => 'TV & Home Theater'));
var_dump(json_encode($foo));

The output is:

[{
 "id": 1,
 "name": "TV & Home Theater"
}]

I need this to only be brackets, no curly braces. Ideas?

• Overv: What you want is not valid JSON, so it's not possible. Curly braces are for key/value objects and square brackets for arrays. Why do you need this?
• scrowler: Javascript doesn't have associative arrays, it uses key -> value objects, which can be entries of the overall array. Don't be scared by them, you can use them in mostly the same way you do in PHP, e.g. loop through main array and access the object properties with square brackets or failing that, object.property_name note: if you lose the curly braces, you'll lose the "key -> value" association and you can only store the values.
• StackOverflowNewbie: I need to seed my database using Laravel's Baum package. The example I saw was this: github.com/etrepat/baum#seeding. I assumed it was JSON.
• scrowler: That's PHP 5.4+'s short array syntax, not JSON
• StackOverflowNewbie: OK, it was a mistake to think it was JSON. Is there a way to convert my array to that format? I'm going to test if it'll accept the normal syntax.

Answer 1

OK, so what you're doing is correct. The original section of your question is PHP code representing your array.

To store it, you json_encode() it - don't worry about the curly braces. Save it to your file, then when you bring it up again you json_decode($file_contents, true) with the true parameter meaning "decode as an associative array, not an object".

Your data is then in that format again... Example:

$json = json_encode($my_array);
echo $json;
$php_again = json_decode($json, true);
print_r($php_again);