Handling JSON API responses in PHP 8.1: Parsing nested arrays with scenarios checking
I'm converting an old project and Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working on a PHP 8.1 application that consumes a JSON API, and I'm having trouble parsing nested arrays in the response. The API returns a structure like this: ```json { "data": { "items": [ {"id": 1, "name": "Item 1"}, {"id": 2, "name": "Item 2"} ], "meta": { "total": 2 } } } ``` I've been using `json_decode` to convert the response into a PHP array, but sometimes I encounter issues when trying to access specific data points. For example: ```php $response = '...'; // JSON response from API $data = json_decode($response, true); if (isset($data['data']['items'])) { foreach ($data['data']['items'] as $item) { echo $item['name'] . "\n"; } } else { echo 'Items data not found.'; } ``` Although this works in most cases, I'm getting a PHP Notice: `Undefined index: items` when the API returns an empty `items` array or when the `data` key is missing altogether. I want to ensure that my code handles these edge cases gracefully. I've tried adding additional checks like: ```php if (isset($data['data']) && is_array($data['data']['items'])) { // Process items } ``` However, this still doesn't seem to catch cases where `data` exists but `items` is not an array. I would like to ensure that my application doesn't break due to unexpected responses from the API. Any suggestions for more robust behavior handling or best practices for checking nested arrays in such scenarios? Is there a cleaner way to validate the structure before accessing its contents? My development environment is Windows. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. For reference, this is a production microservice. Any ideas how to fix this? For context: I'm using Php on Linux. Am I approaching this the right way?