Handling Data in a PHP JSON Object

Working with JSON data in PHP can be straightforward if you understand the structure of the object. Consider fetching trends from the Twitter Search API as an example:

$jsonurl = "http://search.twitter.com/trends.json";
$json = file_get_contents($jsonurl,0,null,null);
$json_output = json_decode($json);

The resulting $json_output is a stdClass object with a property called trends that contains an array of stdClass objects, with each representing a trend.

To access the trend names specifically, you can use a foreach loop:

foreach ( $json_output->trends as $trend ) {
    echo "{$trend->name}\n";
}

This code will output a list of trend names, one per line.