json-machine/README.md

JSON Iterator

Json Iterator is a simple JSON stream parser for PHP based on coroutines, developed for extremely large datasets. Main features are:

• Speed. Performace critical code contains no unnecessary function calls, no regular expressions and uses native json_decode to decode document chunks.
• Ease of use. Just iterate it with foreach. No events and callbacks.
• Supports iteration on any subtree of the document, specified by Json Pointer
• Constant memory footprint for unpredictably large JSON documents.

Examples

Parsing simple JSON document

Let's say that big.json contains this really big JSON document:

// big.json
{
    "apple": {
        "color": "red"
    },
    "pear": {
        "color": "yellow"
    }
}

It can be parsed this way:

<?php

foreach (\JsonIterator\JsonIterator::fromFile('big.json') as $name => $data) {
    // 1st iteration: $name === "apple" and $data === ["color" => "red"]
    // 2nd iteration: $name === "pear" and $data === ["color" => "yellow"]
}

Parsing an array instead of a dictionary follows the same logic. The key in a foreach will be a numeric index of an item.

Parsing JSON document subtree

If you want to iterate only fruits-key subtree in this fruits.json

// fruits.json
{
    "fruits-key": {
        "apple": {
            "color": "red"
        },
        "pear": {
            "color": "yellow"
        }
    }
}

<?php

foreach (\JsonIterator\JsonIterator::fromFile("fruits.json", "/fruits-key" /* <- Json Pointer */) as $name => $data) {
    // The same as above, which means:
    // 1st iteration: $name === "apple" and $data === ["color" => "red"]
    // 2nd iteration: $name === "pear" and $data === ["color" => "yellow"]
}

Implementation detail:

Value of fruits key is not loaded into memory at once, but only one item in fruits key at a time. It is always one item at a time at the level/subtree you are currently iterating. Thus the memory consumption is constant.

Parsing API responses

Error handling