How can I parse a JSON file with PHP?

I can't believe so many people are posting answers without reading the JSON properly.

If you foreach iterate $json_a alone, you have an object of objects. Even if you pass in true as the second parameter, you have a two-dimensional array. If you're looping through the first dimension you can't just echo the second dimension like that. So this is wrong:

foreach ($json_a as $k => $v) {
   echo $k, ' : ', $v;
}

To echo the statuses of each person, try this:

<?php

$string = file_get_contents("/home/michael/test.json");
if ($string === false) {
    // deal with error...
}

$json_a = json_decode($string, true);
if ($json_a === null) {
    // deal with error...
}

foreach ($json_a as $person_name => $person_a) {
    echo $person_a['status'];
}

?>

To iterate over a multidimensional array, you can use RecursiveArrayIterator

$jsonIterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
    new RecursiveArrayIterator(json_decode($json, TRUE)),
    RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST);

foreach ($jsonIterator as $key => $val) {
    if(is_array($val)) {
        echo "$key:\n";
    } else {
        echo "$key => $val\n";
    }
}

Output:

John:
status => Wait
Jennifer:
status => Active
James:
status => Active
age => 56
count => 10
progress => 0.0029857
bad => 0

run on codepad

The most elegant solution:

$shipments = json_decode(file_get_contents("shipments.js"), true);
print_r($shipments);

Remember that the json-file has to be encoded in UTF-8 without BOM. If the file has BOM, then json_decode will return NULL.

Alternatively:

$shipments = json_encode(json_decode(file_get_contents("shipments.js"), true));
echo $shipments;