use the JSON_FORCE_OBJECT option of json_encode:

json_encode($status, JSON_FORCE_OBJECT);

Documentation

JSON_FORCE_OBJECT (integer) Outputs an object rather than an array when a non-associative array is used. Especially useful when the recipient of the output is expecting an object and the array is empty. Available since PHP 5.3.0.

Or, if you want to preserve your "other" arrays inside your object, don't use the previous answer, just use this:

$status = array(
                "message"=>"error",
                "club_id"=>$_club_id,
                "status"=>"1",
                "membership_info"=> new stdClass()
                );

Well after 2 hours of digging (cf Edits)

I found out following :

• In my case it's a encoding problem
• mb_detect_encoding returns probably a faulty response, some strings were probably not UTF-8
• using utf8_encode() on those string solved my problem, but see note below

Here is a recursive function that can force convert to UTF-8 all the strings contained in an array:

function utf8ize($d) {
    if (is_array($d)) {
        foreach ($d as $k => $v) {
            $d[$k] = utf8ize($v);
        }
    } else if (is_string ($d)) {
        return utf8_encode($d);
    }
    return $d;
}

Use it simply like this:

echo json_encode(utf8ize($data));

Note: utf8_encode() encodes ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8 as per the docs so if you are unsure of the input encoding iconv() or mb_convert_encoding() may be better options as noted in comments and other solutions.

The JSON object is created inside PHP. Before then you just have form data.

jQuery will encode form data in a PHP-friendly style.

If you give it:

data: { foo: [1, 2, 3] }

It will convert that to:

foo[]=1&foo[]=2&foo[]=3

(although it will percent encode the [])

You get a key=value pair for each value.

If you have an empty array then you don't have any values, so you don't get any key=value pairs.

There is no way to encode "an empty array" using PHP's extensions to the form url encoding syntax.

You have two basic options:

1. Tell PHP about what data structure you want to create in advance and have it fill in the empty arrays.
2. Generate the JSON on the client

This is because array()==NULL. It does not check the object type in this case.

gettype(null) returns null, whereas

gettype(array()) returns array. Hope you got the difference.

Probably what you need is

if ($json_decoded === null) {
   echo "NULL";
} else
{
   echo "NOT NULL";
}

You can validate at following website: http://jsonlint.com/

You have to use a php "json_decode()" function to decode a json encoded data. Basically json_decode() function converts JSON data to a PHP array.

Syntax: json_decode( data, dataTypeBoolean, depth, options )

data : - The json data that you want to decode in PHP.

dataTypeBoolean(Optional) :- boolean that makes the function return a PHP Associative Array if set to "true", or return a PHP stdClass object if you omit this parameter or set it to "false". Both data types can be accessed like an array and use array based PHP loops for parsing.

depth :- Optional recursion limit. Use an integer as the value for this parameter.

options :- Optional JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING parameter.

Now Comes to your Code

$json_string = '{"a":1,"b":2,"c":3,"d":4,"e":5}' ;

Assign a valid json data to a variable $json_string within single quot's ('') as json string already have double quots.

// here i am decoding a json string by using a php 'json_decode' function, as mentioned above & passing a true parameter to get a PHP associative array otherwise it will bydefault return a PHP std class objecy array.

$json_decoded_data = json_decode($json_string, true);

// just can check here your encoded array data.
// echo '<pre>';
// print_r($json_decoded_data);

// loop to extract data from an array
foreach ($json_decoded_data as $key => $value) {
    echo "$key | $value <br/>";

}