I found the following code online. And I would love to use it in my own projects.
http://dbushell.github.io/Nestable/
This draggable jquery generated tree structure generates a serialized array. To for what seems to me this is a serialized javascript array.
[{"id":1,"children":[{"id":3}]},{"id":2,"children":[{"id":4},{"id":9,"children":[{"id":5,"children":[{"id":6},{"id":7},{"id":8}]}]}]},{"id":11},{"id":12,"children":[{"id":10}]}]
For what I could find I should use parse_str and that should do it.
But to no avail. The array generated is empty.
I tried the following test code :
<?php
$Str = '[{"id":1},{"id":2,"children":[{"id":3},{"id":4},{"id":5,"children":[{"id":6},{"id":7},{"id":8}]},{"id":9},{"id":10}]},{"id":11},{"id":12}]';
parse_str($Str, $values);
print_r($values);
?>
I hope that anyone sees what I am overlooking.
Thanks in advance!
Answer!
What I have overlooked is that this is not a Javascript Serialized array but rather a JSON encoded string.
As suggested below I should use JSON decode.
$Str = json_decode('[{"id":1},{"id":2,"children":[{"id":3},{"id":4},{"id":5,"children":[{"id":6},{"id":7},{"id":8}]},{"id":9},{"id":10}]},{"id":11},{"id":12}]');This will deliver the result as shown below.
IF I want to use the result as an array instead of what supplied I should use the following function to convert the objects to a valid array:
function toArray($obj){ if (is_object($obj)) $obj = (array)$obj; if (is_array($obj)) { $new = array(); foreach ($obj as $key => $val) { $new[$key] = toArray($val); } } else { $new = $obj; } return $new; } $Str = toArray($Str);(* this I copied from : How do I convert an object to an array? *)
No you should use json_decode() like this
<?php
$Str = '[{"id":1},{"id":2,"children":[{"id":3},{"id":4},{"id":5,"children":[{"id":6},{"id":7},{"id":8}]},{"id":9},{"id":10}]},{"id":11},{"id":12}]';
$php_array = json_decode($Str);
// and just in case there is an error while decoding
if ( json_last_error() > 0 ) {
echo json_last_error_msg();
}
print_r($php_array);
?>
Which will generate the output:
Array
(
[0] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 1
)
[1] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 2
[children] => Array
(
[0] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 3
)
[1] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 4
)
[2] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 5
[children] => Array
(
[0] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 6
)
[1] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 7
)
[2] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 8
)
)
)
[3] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 9
)
[4] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 10
)
)
)
[2] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 11
)
[3] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 12
)
)
Or if you want the whole dataset returned as an array rather than the objects that exist in the original data you can add the second parameter to json_decode($Str, true) and it will all be in arrays:
<?php
$Str = '[{"id":1},{"id":2,"children":[{"id":3},{"id":4},{"id":5,"children":[{"id":6},{"id":7},{"id":8}]},{"id":9},{"id":10}]},{"id":11},{"id":12}]';
$php_array = json_decode($Str, true);
// and just in case there is an error while decoding
if ( json_last_error() > 0 ) {
echo json_last_error_msg();
}
print_r($php_array);
?>
Giving this result :
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[id] => 1
)
[1] => Array
(
[id] => 2
[children] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[id] => 3
)
[1] => Array
(
[id] => 4
)
[2] => Array
(
[id] => 5
[children] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[id] => 6
)
[1] => Array
(
[id] => 7
)
[2] => Array
(
[id] => 8
)
)
)
[3] => Array
(
[id] => 9
)
[4] => Array
(
[id] => 10
)
)
)
[2] => Array
(
[id] => 11
)
[3] => Array
(
[id] => 12
)
)