Multidimensional arrays via ajax for PHP

Question

Ok seriously fighting here. I am having trouble trying to send a multidimensional array to PHP via ajax. Here is what I tried:

To simplify rather than copy paste into the code wall:

peoplearray[0] = [name] => 'john' [age] => '28' [sex] => 'Male' peoplearray[1] = [name] => 'julie' [age] => '20' [sex] => 'Female' main_array['item'] = 'x'; main_array['something'] = 'x'; main_array['another'] = 'x'; 

I want to get this in php via post . I figured I could just join them together since I am multi-dimensional:

  main_array['peoplearray'] = peoplearray; 

now do ajax:

 // var data = JSON.stringify(main_array); var send = $.ajax({ type: "POST", cache: false, url: "theurl", data: {data:main_array} //I do change this `main_array` when using the above stringify! }); send.done(function(msg) { console.log(msg); }) 

in PHP I'm just doing the following right now:

 $data= $_POST['data']; print_r($data); 

in firebug: (an empty string)

when I have var data = JSON.stringify(main_array); uncommented, I get the following: [][

if I add $data = json_decode($_POST['data']); in php, I get:

 Array ( ) 

In principle, main_array , I understand, does not have to be an array, so I can get this stuff without problems, but I need to make peoplearray so that I can do several foreach , etc ... with it in php. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm sure I'm just stupid!

EDIT: the argument for this is that peoplearray can have 0 or 100 entries, so I just need to get it in php so that I can foreach use it for DB inputs. If there is a better approach, I would be very grateful for this, as I am still pretty new to this.

EDIT: Thanks Nicola, answer that everything goes fine except for the important part, which is mainarry.peoplearray - it does not appear in the reverse console.log , and I cannot access it in PHP. Any solutions on this or should I put foreach intelligence in javascript and just send everything individually?

Answer 1

I got it for work, keeping peoplearray separate.

So, I did, as Nikola said, and created mainarray as an object, i.e. ad using curlies: {}

peoplearray I left as an array, i.e. declared with [] but then name,age&sex fields that I created as an object, i.e. {} and then .push() them in peoplearray .

Then ajax looked like this:

 var send = $.ajax({ type: "POST", dataType: "json", cache: false, url: "theurl", data: {data:main_array, people:peoplearray} }); 

then with PHP everything is available in $ _POST, and if you

 echo json_encode($people); //or whatever var name it is stored as in the php 

objects i.e. the name,age,sex properties are shown in

 send.done(function(msg) { console.log(msg); }) 

Answer 2

First of all, main_array not an array, but an object, because in javascript there are no associative arrays, and for this reason

 main_array['peoplearray'] = peoplearray; 

equivalently

 main_array.peoplearray = peoplearray; 

and you should declare main_array as follows

 var main_array = {}; 

then try changing your function as follows:

 var send = $.ajax({ type: "POST", dataType: "json", cache: false, url: "theurl", data: {data:main_array} }); 

and server side

 header('Content-type: application/json'); $data= $_POST['data']; echo json_encode($data);