Alexandre Daubois
Contributed by Alexandre Daubois in #59655 and #60188

Symfony 7.3 adds several new components to the growing collection of Symfony packages and components. This article showcases JsonPath, a powerful new tool to query and extract data from JSON.

Take the following JSON snippet:

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$json = <<<'JSON' {"store": {"book": [ {"category": "reference", "author": "Nigel Rees", "title": "Sayings", "price": 8.95}, {"category": "fiction", "author": "Evelyn Waugh", "title": "Sword", "price": 12.99} ]}} JSON;

Just like the DomCrawler component for traversing HTML/XML, you'll first need to create a crawler before querying JSON:

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use Symfony\Component\JsonPath\JsonCrawler; $crawler = new JsonCrawler($json);

From there, use the find() method to run queries:

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// querying for a property of some item (e.g. to get the title of the first book) $result = $crawler->find('$.store.book[0].title'); // outputs: ['Sayings']

The query syntax follows the RFC 9535 (JSONPath: Query Expressions for JSON), giving you access to powerful features:

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// extract descendants from items (e.g. to get all authors) $result = $crawler->find('$..author'); // outputs: ['Nigel Rees', 'Evelyn Waugh'] // filter contents using expressions $result = $crawler->find('$.store.book[?(@.price < 10)]'); // you can use functions like length(), count(), match(), etc. $result = $crawler->find('$.store.book[?length(@.author) > 11]'); $result = $crawler->find('$.store.book[?match(@.author, "[A-Z].*el.+")]');

Do you prefer building queries fluently? The JsonPath component also supports a programmatic, chainable API:

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use Symfony\Component\JsonPath\JsonPath; $path = new JsonPath(); $path = $path ->key('store') ->key('book') ->index(0) ->key('author'); $result = $crawler->find($path); // outputs: ['Nigel Rees']
Published in #Living on the edge