ChrisDevBox

PHP has a built-in function that can decode a JSON string and turn into an object or an object tree and is called PHP-JSON. This is very helpful for when you need to integrate or mashup with other application such as the google APIs. Here is a quick simple example:

<?php
$json_str = ‘{ “name” : “chris”}’;
$obj = json_decode($json_str);
echo $obj->name;
echo “\n”;

The above will return:

chris

Here is a more complex example using the actual Google Searh API:

<?php

$url = “http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Paris%20Hilton”;

// sendRequest
// note how referer is set manually
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, “http://www.chrisdevbox.com/”);
$body = curl_exec($ch);
//echo $body;
curl_close($ch);

// now, process the JSON string
$json = json_decode($body);
// now have some fun with the results…
print_r($json);

Here is the output

And here is the source code

Pretty cool huh? I think the coolest part is the fact that you can pretty much pull anything from google using this… including video, news, blogs, etc… I’ll be writing another article on that. Stay tuned.

BTW, PHP-JSON comes built in with PHP 5.2, for earlier version you’ll have to download, compile and install.

Simple steps

• wget http://aurore.net/projects/php-json/php-json-ext-1.2.1.tar.bz2
• tar xvf php-json-ext-1.2.1.tar.bz2
• cd php-json-ext-1.2.1
• phpize
• ./configure
• make
• make install
• vi /etc/php.ini
• Add the following:
• extension=json.so

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 12:04 am and is filed under JSON, Mashup, PHP.