Skip to content

Normalizing to JSON

The normalizer is able to normalize a data structure to JSON without using the native json_encode() function.

Using the normalizer instead of the native json_encode() function offers some benefits:

Basic usage:

namespace My\App;

$normalizer = (new \CuyZ\Valinor\MapperBuilder())
    ->normalizer(\CuyZ\Valinor\Normalizer\Format::json());

$userAsJson = $normalizer->normalize(
    new \My\App\User(
        name: 'John Doe',
        age: 42,
        country: new \My\App\Country(
            name: 'France',
            countryCode: 'FR',
        ),
    )
);

// `$userAsJson` is a valid JSON string representing the data:
// {"name":"John Doe","age":42,"country":{"name":"France","countryCode":"FR"}}

Streaming to a PHP resource

By default, the JSON normalizer will return a JSON string representing the data it was given. Instead of getting a string, it is possible to stream the JSON data to a PHP resource:

$file = fopen('path/to/some_file.json', 'w');

$normalizer = (new \CuyZ\Valinor\MapperBuilder())
    ->normalizer(\CuyZ\Valinor\Normalizer\Format::json())
    ->streamTo($file);

$normalizer->normalize(/* … */);

// The file now contains the JSON data

Another benefit of streaming the data to a PHP resource is that it may be more memory-efficient when using generators — for instance when querying a database:

// In this example, we assume that the result of the query below is a generator,
// every entry will be yielded one by one, instead of everything being loaded in
// memory at once.
$users = $database->execute('SELECT * FROM users');

$file = fopen('path/to/some_file.json', 'w');

$normalizer = (new \CuyZ\Valinor\MapperBuilder())
    ->normalizer(\CuyZ\Valinor\Normalizer\Format::json())
    ->streamTo($file);

// Even if there are thousands of users, memory usage will be kept low when
// writing JSON into the file.
$normalizer->normalize($users);

Passing json_encode flags

By default, the JSON normalizer will only use JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR to encode non-boolean scalar values. There might be use-cases where projects will need flags like JSON_JSON_PRESERVE_ZERO_FRACTION.

This can be achieved by passing these flags to the JsonNormalizer::withOptions() method:

namespace My\App;

$normalizer = (new \CuyZ\Valinor\MapperBuilder())
    ->normalizer(\CuyZ\Valinor\Normalizer\Format::json())
    ->withOptions(\JSON_PRESERVE_ZERO_FRACTION);

$lowerManhattanAsJson = $normalizer->normalize(
    new \My\App\Coordinates(
        longitude: 40.7128,
        latitude: -74.0000
    )
);

// `$lowerManhattanAsJson` is a valid JSON string representing the data:
// {"longitude":40.7128,"latitude":-74.0000}

The method accepts an int-mask of the following JSON_* constant representations (see official doc for more information):

  • JSON_HEX_QUOT
  • JSON_HEX_TAG
  • JSON_HEX_AMP
  • JSON_HEX_APOS
  • JSON_INVALID_UTF8_IGNORE
  • JSON_INVALID_UTF8_SUBSTITUTE
  • JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK
  • JSON_PRESERVE_ZERO_FRACTION
  • JSON_UNESCAPED_LINE_TERMINATORS
  • JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES
  • JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE

JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR is always enforced and thus is not accepted.