How to access JSON decoded array in PHP

Question

I returned an array of JSON data type from javascript to PHP, I used json_decode($data, true) to convert it to an associative array, but when I try to use it using the associative index, I get the error "Undefined index" The returned data looks like this

array(14) { [0]=> array(4) { ["id"]=> string(3) "597" ["c_name"]=> string(4) "John" ["next_of_kin"]=> string(10) "5874594793" ["seat_no"]=> string(1) "4" } 
[1]=> array(4) { ["id"]=> string(3) "599" ["c_name"]=> string(6) "George" ["next_of_kin"]=> string(7) "6544539" ["seat_no"]=> string(1) "2" } 
[2]=> array(4) { ["id"]=> string(3) "601" ["c_name"]=> string(5) "Emeka" ["next_of_kin"]=> string(10) "5457394839" ["seat_no"]=> string(1) "9" } 
[3]=> array(4) { ["id"]=> string(3) "603" ["c_name"]=> string(8) "Chijioke" ["next_of_kin"]=> string(9) "653487309" ["seat_no"]=> string(1) "1" }  

Please, how do I access such array in PHP? Thanks for any suggestion.

Answer 1

As you're passing true as the second parameter to json_decode, in the above example you can retrieve data doing something similar to:

$myArray = json_decode($data, true);
echo $myArray[0]['id']; // Fetches the first ID
echo $myArray[0]['c_name']; // Fetches the first c_name
// ...
echo $myArray[2]['id']; // Fetches the third ID
// etc..

If you do NOT pass true as the second parameter to json_decode it would instead return it as an object:

echo $myArray[0]->id;