How to return JSON data from php MongoCursor

Question

I am using PHP to connect with MongoDB. My code is as follows.

// connect
$m = new MongoClient($con_string); // connect to a remote host at a given port
$db = $m->main;

$customers = $db->customer->find();

i want to return $customers collection as json document to my HTML. How can i do this?

`foreach($customers as $k => $row){ $newa[] = json_encode($row); }` you may need to convert the object types to pure string first though like the `MongoId` — Sammaye, Jan 09 '13 at 09:48

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 09 '13 at 09:59

You can do this two ways:

echo json_encode(iterator_to_array($customers));

or you can manually scroll through it:

foreach($customers as $k => $row){
    echo json_encode($row);
}

Each of MongoDBs objects should have their __toString() methods correctly implemented to bring back the representation of the value.

user10 · Answer 2 · 2013-01-10T04:57:20.777

8

This also will work. And you can customize your json as well.

    $arr = array();

    foreach($customers as $c)
    {
        $temp = array("name" => $c["name"], "phone" => $c["phone"], 
                                            "address" => $c["address"]);
        array_push($arr, $temp);
    }

    echo json_encode($arr);

edited Jan 10 '13 at 04:57

answered Jan 09 '13 at 10:00

user10

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1

this solution is better because it adds the comma to the json.. +1 – ianaz Aug 29 '13 at 07:56
@ianaz The comma which separates multiple values from collection. – Jack Mar 12 '14 at 23:30
@Jack don't get it, it does the exact same as iterator to cursor, it forms an array of all rows and the json_encodes it – Sammaye Mar 20 '14 at 08:00

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 23 '15 at 08:23

Other answers work, but it is good to know that the generated JSON will have the following form (in this example I use an hypothetical "name" field for your customers):

{
    "5587d2c3cd8348455b26feab": {
        "_id": {
            "$id": "5587d2c3cd8348455b26feab"
        },
        "name": "Robert"
    },
    "5587d2c3cd8348455b26feac": {
        "_id": {
            "$id": "5587d2c3cd8348455b26feac"
        },
        "name": "John"
    }
}

So in case you don't want the Object _id to be the key of each of your result objects you can add a false parameter to iterator_to_array. Your code would be:

echo json_encode(iterator_to_array($customers, false), true);

This creates the same result as

$result = Array();
foreach ($customers as $entry) {
    array_push($result, $entry);
}
echo json_encode($result, true);

which is an array of JSON objects

[
    {
        "_id": {
            "$id": "5587d2c3cd8348455b26feab"
        },
        "name": "Robert"
    },
    {
        "_id": {
            "$id": "5587d2c3cd8348455b26feac"
        },
        "name": "John"
    }
]

How to return JSON data from php MongoCursor

3 Answers3

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