PHP to Parse JSON values into Html table

Question

The company I work for decided to keep all the database queries in a RESTful API file. Was a big learning curve but finally I have the JSON object returning with the data. My problem now is how to populate the values into an HTML table.

Below I will show you what I have for now, what I already tried and the sample code, so you may suggest where I need to be corrected.

Thanks So much.

1. First, I request the data:

$schoolid = $_GET['schoolid'];
$data = file_get_contents("http://www.mydomainname.com/api/webapi.php?Oper=liststudents&schoolid=" . $schoolid);
echo $data;

2. And here's a sample of the results. Obviously A Json string:

{"data":[{
    "ID":"0450",
    "FirstName":"\u05d9\u05d5\u05e1\u05e3\u05de\u05e0\u05d7\u05dd",
    "LastName":"\u05d1\u05d9\u05e0\u05e0\u05e2\u05e8",
    "SchoolID":"17",
    "UID":"0001","
    TeacherID":"26"},{"ID":"0017",
    "FirstName":"\u05d0\u05e8\u05e8\u05d9\u05d9\u05e0\u05d3",
    "LastName":"\u05d6\u05d0\u05d1",
    "SchoolID":"17","UID":"0017",
    "TeacherID":"24"},{"ID":"0018",
    "FirstName":"\u05d3\u05d5\u05d1 \u05d2\u05dc\u05d5\u05d9\u05d1,
    "LastName":"\u05d9\u05e9\u05db\u05e8",
    "SchoolID":"17",
    "UID":"0018",
    "TeacherID":"24"}

I guess it's still an object that has to be parsed... So now,

3. Following is an illustration of what I'm trying to achieve.

|ID|  FirstNm  |  LastNm | School |UID| Teacher|      
|---|------------|-----------|-----------|-----|------------|     
|---|------------|-----------|-----------|-----|------------|

And so on, and so furth...

4. Here are some methods I tried so far but I either get "0" results, or it throws an error

A.

foreach($data->{'data'} as $obj){
    echo '<tr>
    <td>' . $obj->{'ID'} .'</td>
    <td>' . $obj->{'FirstName'} .'</td>
    <td>' . $obj->{'LastName'} .'</td>
    <td>' . $obj->{'SchoolID'} .'</td>
    <td>' . $obj->{'UID'} .'</td>
    <td>' . $obj->{'TeacherID'} .'</td>
</tr>'

B.

foreach ($data as $key => $jsons) {
    $table ='<table class="'.$jsons['class'].'" border="1">';
    foreach ($jsons as $rkey => $rvalue) {
        if($rkey=='head')
        {
            $table.='<tr>';
            foreach($rvalue as $rvv)
            {
                $table.='<th>'.$rvv.'</th>';
            }
            $table.='</tr>';
        }else
        if($rkey=='rows')
        {
            foreach($rvalue as $rvv)
            {
                $table.='<tr>';
                foreach($rvv as $rv)
                {
                    $table.='<td>'.$rv.'</td>';
                }
                $table.='</tr>';
            }
        }
    }
}
echo $table;

Tried few more things, but I only need ONE working model...

Answer 1

This is what I would do:

1. fix your JSON. I think you posted it wrong

   $json = '{"data":[{"ID":"0450","FirstName":"\u05d9\u05d5\u05e1\u05e3\u05de\u05e0\u05d7\u05dd","LastName":"\u05d1\u05d9\u05e0\u05e0\u05e2\u05e8","SchoolID":"17","UID":"0001","TeacherID":"26"},{"ID":"0017","FirstName":"\u05d0\u05e8\u05e8\u05d9\u05d9\u05e0\u05d3","LastName":"\u05d6\u05d0\u05d1","SchoolID":"17","UID":"0017","TeacherID":"24"},{"ID":"0018","FirstName":"\u05d3\u05d5\u05d1 \u05d2\u05dc\u05d5\u05d9\u05d1","LastName":"\u05d9\u05e9\u05db\u05e8","SchoolID":"17","UID":"0018","TeacherID":"24"}]}';
   

2. turn it into a PHP object with json_decode

   $obj = json_decode($json);
   

3. use var_dump($obj) to debug, this will give you something like this:

   object(stdClass)[1]
     public 'data' => 
       array (size=3)
         0 => 
           object(stdClass)[2]
              public 'ID' => string '0450' (length=4)
              public 'FirstName' => string '×™×•×¡×£×ž× ×—×' (length=16)
              public 'LastName' => string '×‘×™× × ×¢×¨' (length=12)
              public 'SchoolID' => string '17' (length=2)
              public 'UID' => string '0001' (length=4)
              public 'TeacherID' => string '26' (length=2)
         1 => 
           object(stdClass)[3]
              public 'ID' => string '0017' (length=4)
              public 'FirstName' => string '××¨×¨×™×™× ×“' (length=14)
              public 'LastName' => string '×–×ב' (length=6)
              public 'SchoolID' => string '17' (length=2)
              public 'UID' => string '0017' (length=4)
              public 'TeacherID' => string '24' (length=2)
         2 => 
           object(stdClass)[4]
              public 'ID' => string '0018' (length=4)
              public 'FirstName' => string 'דוב גלויב' (length=17)
              public 'LastName' => string 'ישכר' (length=8)
              public 'SchoolID' => string '17' (length=2)
              public 'UID' => string '0018' (length=4)
              public 'TeacherID' => string '24' (length=2)
   

4. Lastly, now that you see what you're working with, you can access the data using the -> object operator:

   foreach ($obj->data as $row) {
       var_dump($row->ID);
       var_dump($row->FirstName);
       var_dump($row->LastName);
       //...
   }
   

Answer 2

Something like this should work.

   <?php

   // Json_decode the file contents
   $file_data = json_decode(trim($file_text));
   // var_dump this $file_data and let us know what you get

   // Select the array potion 'data'
   $data = $file_data->data;
   // var_dump this $data and let us know what you get

    foreach ($data as $obj) {
       ...display code...
    }

    ?>

Throw in some var_dump() statements for the $file_data and $data to see if you are truly getting the data you expect. There may be some encoding/formatting issues with the way the data was stored. Do you know what processed and stored this data?

Concerning the encoding, I did a little research. If I'm not mistaken you have Unicode Entities that need to be converted to Unicode Text for display. iconv is great for conversion, but I'm not sure what the original encoding was. Was it Japanese writing?

$text = "\u05d0\u05e8\u05e8\u05d9\u05d9\u05e0\u05d3";

echo iconv('UCS-2BE', 'UTF-8', $text);

produces

屵〵搰屵〵攸屵〵攸屵〵搹屵〵搹屵〵攰屵〵搳

Or... try this from How to decode Unicode escape sequences like "\u00ed" to proper UTF-8 encoded characters?

$str = "\u05d0\u05e8\u05e8\u05d9\u05d9\u05e0\u05d3";

$str = preg_replace_callback('/\\\\u([0-9a-fA-F]{4})/', function ($match) {
    return mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*', $match[1]), 'UTF-8', 'UCS-2BE');
}, $str);
echo $str."\n\n";

Produces what looks like Hebrew characters:

ארריינד

If that's correct, write yourself a function to decode your data before display.