JSONPath for PHP 5.4 - 7.0

This is a JSONPath implementation for PHP based on Stefan Goessner's JSONPath script.

JSONPath is an XPath-like expression language for filtering, flattening and extracting data.

This project aims to be a clean and simple implementation with the following goals:

• Object-oriented code (should be easier to manage or extend in future)
• Expressions are parsed into tokens using code inspired by the Doctrine Lexer. The tokens are cached internally to avoid re-parsing the expressions.
• There is no eval() in use
• Any combination of objects/arrays/ArrayAccess-objects can be used as the data input which is great if you're de-serializing JSON in to objects or if you want to process your own data structures.

🔻 Please note, that this branch (based on JSONPath 0.7.2) is protected. There are no intentions to make any updates here. Please consider upgrading to PHP 7.1 or newer.

composer require softcreatr/jsonpath:"^0.5 || ^0.7"

use Flow\JSONPath\JSONPath;

$data = ['people' => [
    ['name' => 'Sascha'],
    ['name' => 'Bianca'],
    ['name' => 'Alexander'],
    ['name' => 'Maximilian'],
]];

print_r((new JSONPath($data))->find('$.people.*.name')->getData());

/*
Array
(
    [0] => Sascha
    [1] => Bianca
    [2] => Alexander
    [3] => Maximilian
)
*/

use Flow\JSONPath\JSONPath;

$data = json_decode('{"name":"Sascha Greuel","birthdate":"1987-12-16","city":"Gladbeck","country":"Germany"}', false);

print_r((new JSONPath($data))->find('$')->getData()[0]);

/*
stdClass Object
(
    [name] => Sascha Greuel
    [birthdate] => 1987-12-16
    [city] => Gladbeck
    [country] => Germany
)
*/

More examples can be found in the Wiki

The options flag JSONPath::ALLOW_MAGIC will instruct JSONPath when retrieving a value to first check if an object has a magic __get() method and will call this method if available. This feature is iffy and not very predictable as:

• wildcard and recursive features will only look at public properties and can't smell which properties are magically accessible
• there is no property_exists check for magic methods so an object with a magic __get() will always return true when checking if the property exists
• any errors thrown or unpredictable behaviour caused by fetching via __get() is your own problem to deal with

use Flow\JSONPath\JSONPath;

$myObject = (new Foo())->get('bar');
$jsonPath = new JSONPath($myObject, JSONPath::ALLOW_MAGIC);

For more examples, check the JSONPathTest.php tests file.

Script expressions are not supported as the original author intended because:

• This would only be achievable through eval (boo).
• Using the script engine from different languages defeats the purpose of having a single expression evaluate the same way in different languages which seems like a bit of a flaw if you're creating an abstract expression syntax.

So here are the types of query expressions that are supported:

[?(@._KEY_ _OPERATOR_ _VALUE_)] // <, >, <=, >=, !=, ==, =~, in and nin
e.g.
[?(@.title == "A string")] //
[?(@.title = "A string")]
// A single equals is not an assignment but the SQL-style of '=='
[?(@.title =~ /^a(nother)? string$/i)]
[?(@.title in ["A string", "Another string"])]
[?(@.title nin ["A string", "Another string"])]

• This project has not implemented multiple string indexes e.g. $[name,year] or $["name","year"]. I have no ETA on that feature, and it would require some re-writing of the parser that uses a very basic regex implementation.

FlowCommunications/JSONPath is the predecessor of this library by Stephen Frank

Other / Similar implementations can be found in the Wiki.

MIT