Access json object in php

  John Mwaniki /   04 Sep 2021

What is JSON?

JavaScript Object Notation[JSON] is a lightweight human-readable text format for storing and transporting data consisting of name-value pairs and arrays.

It is easy to generate and parse in many programming languages. It is the most popular and lightweight data-interchange format for web applications, and the de-facto format for the data exchange in RESTful web services requests and responses.

In this post, we will cover how to decode a JSON object and access its data in PHP.

Below is an example of a simple JSON object:

{
  "firstName": "John", 
  "lastName": "Doe", 
  "email": "", 
  "phone": "111-111-1111"
 }

How to receive JSON data in PHP

1. From a POST or GET request

To receive JSON data as a POST request, we use the “php://input” along with the function file_get_contents[] as below:

$json = file_get_contents["php://input"];

For instance, the JSON data is sent below as a POST request: