Manipulate JSON node to have [] parentheses-CodePudding

Json response from 3rd party platform which I cant control.

$json = '{
  "question1": "answera",
  "question2": [
       "answerb",
       "answerc"]
}';

Any 'question' can have multiple 'answers', however if there is only one 'answer' for that question the response comes back without the [] parentheses - this is breaking the insert into the next system (that I also dont have control over) as it is expecting the [].

Using PHP is there a way to manipulate the json string to be the following, irrelevant of the number of 'answers':

"question1": ["answera"],

CodePudding user response：

You can convert string contents into an array. But you habe to iterate over all answers for this purpose.

Creating an array with an if-condition

<?php
$json = '{
  "question1": "answera",
  "question2": [
       "answerb",
       "answerc"
  ]
}';

// second parameter for array result
$array = json_decode($json, true);

foreach ($array as $question => $answer) {
    if (is_string($answer) === true) {
        $array[$question] = [ $answer ];
    }
}

This one results into ...

array(2) {
  'question1' =>
  array(1) {
    [0] =>
    string(7) "answera"
  }
  'question2' =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(7) "answerb"
    [1] =>
    string(7) "answerc"
  }
}

For any further JSON processing you can convert the PHP array back into JSON.

$json = json_encode($array);

Results into ...

string(109) "{
    "question1": [
        "answera"
    ],
    "question2": [
        "answerb",
        "answerc"
    ]
}"

Casting with (array)

Another solution taken from the comments was mentioned by @RickN. Casting with (array) avoids the if condition and could possibly be faster, if that matters for your application.

foreach ($array as $question => $answer) {
    $array[$question] = (array) $answer;
}