Return JSON response instead of JSON String

Question

I am working on building REST API which will return data of regions. API is working as expected but problem I am facing is, it is returning response with JSON string and not able to parse that. Would like to get JSON response.

webapi.xml

    <route url="/V1/getRegions" method="GET">
        <service class="Vendor\Module\Api\RegionsInterface" method="getRegions"/>
        <resources>
            <resource ref="self"/>
        </resources>
    </route>

Interface

<?php
namespace Vendor\Module\Api;

interface RegionsInterface
{
    /**
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function getRegions();
}

Next I added preference for interface and here is that class.

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);
namespace Vendor\Module\Model;

use Vendor\Module\Api\RegionsInterface;

class Regions implements RegionsInterface
{
    public function getRegions()
    {
        $data = [
            'status' => true,
            'message' => 'We will let you know!'
        ];

        return json_encode($data);

    }
}

When I am triggering API with above code, it returns like this,

"{\"status\":true,\"message\":\"We will let you know!\"}"

I want response to be like,

{"status":true,"message":"We will let you know!"}

Any idea how to achieve this ?

Answer 1

Try with below code

$data = [
    'status' => true,
    'message' => 'We will let you know!'
];

$response[] = $data;
return $response;

Answer 2

The concept of repository pattern comes here. Instead of returning a string, your API call should return Object. Refer how Magento's '/V1/customers/:customerId/billingAddress' API of Magento_Customer module works. It might give you some insight. It is a good starting point.

Also I found this content useful for API development - https://webkul.com/blog/magento2-custom-rest-api/

Answer 3

Try to strip slashes and other useless things from string
Try something like this

$response="{\"status\":true,\"message\":\"We will let you know!\"}";
$response=stripslashes($response);
echo $response;