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PHP Shopping Cart Tutorial

I purchased the images from Dreamstime and they're not licensed for public use so I used some simple placeholder images for the downloadable zip instead.

JSON

The products.json file is an array of 6 objects. The difference between a JSON object and a JSON array is that the structure of an array contains one set of square braces and the structure of an object contains only curly braces.

So this is an array:

{
   products:[
     { },
     { }
   ]
}

and this is an object:

{
   products:{
     { },
     { }
   }
}

It's not just an array, it's an array of objects. Each of the inner-nested name value pairs enclosed in curly braces is an object. The following component of the json array in the JSON file is an object:

{
   "id": 0,
   "name": "Blender",
   "price": 39.00,
   "image": "blender.jpg"
}

Our code doesn't consist of just curly braces, it uses square braces too so it's an array and not an object. Another clue is that we are using the foreach method and foreach only works on arrays.

The json file that populates the array must start with id=0 and not id=1 because $_SESSION["cart_items"] is an array and its first element has an index of zero. If id is set to one, you get the wrong super global variable $_POST["product_id"] used to collect form data.

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