Parsing and searching through JSON in PHP

I need some help with parsing and looking through JSON result with PHP. Within the example result below, I need to check against the categories of the technology.

The outcome I would expect is that if the category analytics has been found, to flag this with a true variable, and also to set the variable with the name of the analytics, for example “google analytics”

This is the example code

foreach ($resp['technologies'] as $item) {
    if ($item['categories'][0] === 'analytics') {
        $found = true;
        $analyticsis= $item['name'];

This is the example JSON we are looking through.

[{
    "url": "https://www.websiteexample.co.uk",
    "technologies": [{
      "slug": "google-analytics",
      "name": "Google Analytics",
      "versions": [],
      "trafficRank": 0,
      "categories": [{
          "id": 10,
          "slug": "analytics",
          "name": "Analytics"
        },
        {
          "id": 61,
          "slug": "saas",
          "name": "SaaS"
        }
      ]
    }

Answer

First of all, json is a string.
If you have json, it should be parsed:

$data = json_decode($json, true);

If your “json” is an array, it is not a json, it is an array.

---

Search

Just traverse into you structure and when you found what you looking for, stop and save all necessary data:

$json = <<<'JSON'
[{
    "url": "https://www.websiteexample.co.uk",
    "technologies": [{
      "slug": "google-analytics",
      "name": "Google Analytics",
      "categories": [
        {"id": 10, "slug": "analytics", "name": "Analytics"},
        {"id": 61, "slug": "saas", "name": "SaaS"}
      ]
    }]
}]
JSON;

$data = json_decode($json, true);

$needle = 'analytics';
$foundTech = null;
$foundCategory = null;
foreach ($data as $resp) {
  foreach ($resp['technologies'] as $tech) {
    foreach ($tech['categories'] as $category) {
      if ($category['slug'] === $needle) {
        $foundTech = $tech;
        $foundCategory = $category;
        break 3;
      }
    }
  }
}
if ($foundCategory) {
  echo $foundTech['name'], PHP_EOL;
  echo $foundCategory['name'], PHP_EOL;
}

Google Analytics
Analytics

If you need more than one search in that structure it would be wise to create some maps/indices before.