Convert A CSV File Into JSON Using PHP

This is a short tutorial on how to convert the data in a CSV file into a JSON string format. For this example, we will assume that we have a CSV file called names.csv and that it contains the following data:

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Jack,Ireland,34 John,USA,19 Michelle,Spain,23 Robert,USA,38 Lisa,United Kingdom,40

As you can see – it’s pretty simple and straight-forward. To convert it into JSON, we will need to read the CSV file using PHP before converting it into JSON.

Here’s a quick example using the CSV file above:

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<?php   //Open our CSV file using the fopen function. $fh = fopen("names.csv", "r");   //Setup a PHP array to hold our CSV rows. $csvData = array();   //Loop through the rows in our CSV file and add them to //the PHP array that we created above. while (($row = fgetcsv($fh, 0, ",")) !== FALSE) {     $csvData[] = $row; }   //Finally, encode our array into a JSON string format so that we can print it out. echo json_encode($csvData);

Explained:

1. We opened our CSV file using the fopen function. We set the second parameter to “r” because we only need to read the file – not modify it.
2. We created a PHP array called $csvData. This array will contain the data from our CSV file.
3. We looped through the rows in our CSV file using the fgetcsv function and added them to our $csvData array.
4. Finally, once our loop is completed, we convert the CSV data into a JSON string by using the function json_encode.