Parsing an Object with PHP

January 29, 2022

I have the following format:

{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "61f41a529210000060005487" }, "number" : "3", "name" : "Honduras", "description" : "1500m height farming, price per 200gr", "price" : 7, "stock" : 10, "stars" : "Rated with 4.0 stars by users." }

I need to parse a few entries like the above in PHP. I am using foreach for that purpose. Everything except {"_id": {"$oid": … }} field seems to be parsed correctly. I get the following error:

Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot access offset of type string on string

PHP script:

 $products = json_encode($cursor['products']);
 $products = json_decode($products, true) ;
 foreach ($products as $product) {
      $stringID = (string)$product['_id'];
      echo '<tr>';
           echo '<td>' . $stringID . '</td>';
           echo '<td>' . $product['number'] . '</td>';
           echo '<td>' . $product['name'] . '</td>';
           echo '<td>' . $product['description'] . '</td>'; 
           echo '<td>' . $product['price'] . '</td>'; 
           echo '<td>' . $product['stock'] . '</td>'; 
           echo '<td>' . $product['stars'] . '</td>';
       echo '</tr>';
 }

I have tried many solutions can’t parse it though. Any suggestions?

>Solution :

$product is a string, not an object. You should json_decode($product) before to access to properties.

foreach ($products as $product) 
{
    $product = json_decode($product);    // << decode here
    $stringID = $product['_id']['$oid']; // << access to ID

    // echo row :
    echo '<tr>';
         echo '<td>' . $stringID . '</td>';
         echo '<td>' . $product['number'] . '</td>';
         echo '<td>' . $product['name'] . '</td>';
         echo '<td>' . $product['description'] . '</td>'; 
         echo '<td>' . $product['price'] . '</td>'; 
         echo '<td>' . $product['stock'] . '</td>'; 
         echo '<td>' . $product['stars'] . '</td>';
     echo '</tr>';
}