A RESTful web service is a loose term describing web APIs implemented using HTTP and the principles of REST. A RESTful web service describes a collection of resources, along with basic operations a client can perform on those resources through the API
Many REST APIs use JSON (or JavaScript Object Notation) to carry responses from REST API endpoints. PHP natively supports converting data to JSON format from PHP variables and vice versa through its JSON extension
To get a JSON representation of a PHP variable, use json_encode():
$data = array(1, 2, “three”);
$jsonData = json_encode($data);
echo $jsonData;
[1, 2, “three”]
Similarly, if you have a string containing JSON data, you can turn it into a PHP variable using json_decode():
$jsonData = "[1, 2, [3, 4], \"five\"]";
$data = json_decode($jsonData);
print_r($data);
Array(
[0] => 1
[1] => 2
[2] => Array(
[0] => 3
[1] => 4
)
[3] => five
)