passing ajax associative array to php associative array

Question

I'm trying to pass form values to PHP via $.ajax method. I have following form in html:

<form>
<p>
   <label for="login">User ID:</label>
   <input type="text" name="login" id="login" value="user name">
</p>

<p>
   <label for="password">Password:</label>
   <input type="password" name="password" id="password" value="password">
</p>
</form>

and ajax:

$("form").submit(function(event) {
 var formInput = $('form').serialize();// tried with serializeArray() also

 var request = $.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url:"../some.php", 
    data: {formInput:formInput},
    statusCode: {
                404: function() { alert("file not found");}}

 });

php:

<?
$data = $_POST['formInput'];
$data = array();
parse_str($_POST, $data);
print_r($data);
?>

On console it prints:

(
     [Array] =>
)

What I wanted was for $data to be an associative array as :

$data = array(
        'login' => 'foo'
        'password' => 'bar'
        );

but it seems like $data is being handled as a string... Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Use data: $('form').serializeArray() instead of data: {formInput:formInput},

And then in the php side, $_POST is just the data you want.

Answer 2

you need to specify you want an associative array instead of an object from json_decode:

json_decode($data, true);

You might also need to do this -

$('form').serializeArray();

Answer 3

instead of this :

$("form").submit(function(event) {
 var formInput = $('form').serialize();// tried with serializeArray() also

 var request = $.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url:"../some.php", 
    data: {formInput:formInput},
    statusCode: {
                404: function() { alert("file not found");}}
 });

use this :

$("form").submit(function(event) {
 var formInput = $('form').serialize();// tried with serializeArray() also

 var request = $.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url:"../some.php", 
    data: formInput,
    statusCode: {
                404: function() { alert("file not found");}}
 });

Answer 4

What we want is to serialize to a json object that can then be decoded. Use THIS pluggin to get access to .serializeObject.

$("form").submit(function(event) {
 var formInput = $('form').serializeObject();
 formInput = JSON.stringify(formInput);

 var request = $.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url:"../some.php", 
    data: {formInput:formInput},
    statusCode: {
                404: function() { alert("file not found");}}

 });

Then on the php side you can decode the JSON easily

$data = json_decode($_POST['formInput'], true);

Answer 5

From great responses I've figured out what my issue was. When I was submitting POST i was putting array into an array.

the following ajax code:

$("form").submit(function(event) {
var formInput = $('form').serialize();// tried with serializeArray() also

var request = $.ajax({
type: "POST",
url:"../some.php", 
data: {formInput:formInput},
statusCode: {
            404: function() { alert("file not found");}}
});

was changed to:

$("form").submit(function(event) {
var formInput = $('form').serializeArray();

var request = $.ajax({
type: "POST",
url:"../some.php", 
data: formInput,
statusCode: {
            404: function() { alert("file not found");}}
});

And PHP was changed to:

<? $data = $_POST;
    print_r($data); ?>

on cosole it printed exactly what I wanted:

Array
(
[login] => admin
[password] => qwerty123!
)

Thank you everyone for quick responses