Accessing data from API json response. Arrays? Laravel - json

Question

I am trying to access the steamid data in a json response returned by an API, specifically the Steam API.
The responses look like this:
I've made it return json but why do I see array all over the place?
How would I access the steamid data? I'm getting a bit confused as I thought this would be json.
I'm using guzzle to get the data and converting it to json using the guzzle json() method:
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Answer 1

The API is indeed using JSON to send/receive , however JSON is just a string, so in order to use that data PHP must parse it, which is automatically handled by guzzle, so as soon as you get the data back it has automatically decoded the data into a usable format for yourself.
It does this using the json_encode() and json_decode() functions.
You'd be able to access the steamid with the following.
// Assuming $data is your response from the API.
$players = array_get($data, 'response.players', []);
foreach($players as $player)
{
$steamId = array_get($player, 'steamid', null);
}
Using the laravel helper array_get() function is a great way of ensuring you return a sane default if the data doesn't exist as well as eliminating the need to keep doing things like isset() to avoid errors about undefined indexes, etc. http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/helpers
Alternativly not using the laravel helpers you could use something similar to below, although I'd advise you add checks to avoid the aforementioned problems.
foreach($data['response']['players'] as $player)
{
$steamId = $player['steamid'];
}
If you didn't want guzzle to automatically decode the API's JSON I believe you should just be able to call the getBody() method to return the JSON string.
$json = $response->getBody();