JSON decode

https://www.w3schools.com/php/func_json_decode.asp

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8599595/send-json-data-from-javascript-to-php

This is a summary of the main solutions with easy-to-reproduce code:

Method 1 (application/json or text/plain + JSON.stringify)

var data = {foo: 'blah "!"', bar: 123};
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("POST", "test.php");
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() { if (xhr.readyState === 4 && xhr.status === 200) { console.log(xhr.responseText); } }
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/json") // or "text/plain"
xhr.send(JSON.stringify(data));

PHP side, you can get the data with:

print_r(json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true));

Method 2 (x-www-form-urlencoded + JSON.stringify)

var data = {foo: 'blah "!"', bar: 123};
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("POST", "test.php");
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() { if (xhr.readyState === 4 && xhr.status === 200) { console.log(xhr.responseText); } }
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xhr.send("json=" + encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(data)));

Note: encodeURIComponent(...) is needed for example if the JSON contains & character.

PHP side, you can get the data with:

print_r(json_decode($_POST['json'], true));

Method 3 (x-www-form-urlencoded + URLSearchParams)

var data = {foo: 'blah "!"', bar: 123};
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("POST", "test.php");
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() { if (xhr.readyState === 4 && xhr.status === 200) { console.log(xhr.responseText); } }
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xhr.send(new URLSearchParams(data).toString());

PHP side, you can get the data with:

print_r($_POST);

Examples

json_decode('{"foo":"bar"}', true); // returns array("foo" => "bar")
json_decode('{"foo":"bar"}');       // returns an object, not an array.

Store JSON data in a PHP variable, and then decode it into a PHP associative array:

$jsonobj = '{"Peter":35,"Ben":37,"Joe":43}';

var_dump(json_decode($jsonobj, true));

How to access the values from the PHP object:

$jsonobj = '{"Peter":35,"Ben":37,"Joe":43}';

$obj = json_decode($jsonobj);

echo $obj->Peter;
echo $obj->Ben;
echo $obj->Joe;

How to access the values from the PHP associative array:

$jsonobj = '{"Peter":35,"Ben":37,"Joe":43}';

$arr = json_decode($jsonobj, true);

echo $arr["Peter"];
echo $arr["Ben"];
echo $arr["Joe"];