README

Produce and apply json-patch objects.

Implements IETF JSON-patch (RFC 6902) and JSON-pointer (RFC 6901):

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6901

Using with Composer

To use this library as a Composer dependency in your project, include the following sections in your project's composer.json file:

    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/mikemccabe/json-patch-php"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "mikemccabe/json-patch-php": "dev-master"
    }

Then, in your project's code, use the JsonPatch class definition from the mikemccabe\JsonPatch namespace like so:

use mikemccabe\JsonPatch\JsonPatch;

Entry points

• JsonPatch::get($doc, $pointer) - get a value from a json document
• JsonPatch::patch($doc, $patches) - apply patches to $doc and return result
• JsonPatch::diff($src, $dst) - return patches to create $dst from $src

Arguments are PHP arrays, i.e. the output of json_decode($json_string, 1)

(Note that you MUST pass 1 as the second argument to json_decode to get an array. This library does not work with stdClass objects.)

All structures are implemented directly as PHP arrays. An array is considered to be 'associative' (e.g. like a JSON 'object') if it contains at least one non-numeric key.

Because of this, empty arrays ([]) and empty objects ({}) compare the same, and (for instance) an 'add' of a string key to an empty array will succeed in this implementation where it might fail in others.

$simplexml_mode is provided to help with working with arrays produced from XML in the style of simplexml - e.g. repeated XML elements are expressed as arrays. When $simplexml_mode is enabled, leaves with scalar values are implicitly treated as length-1 arrays, so this test will succeed:

{ "comment": "basic simplexml array promotion",
  "doc": { "foo":1 },
  "patch": [ { "op":"add", "path":"/foo/1", "value":2 } ],
  "expected": { "foo":[1, 2] } },

Also, when $simplexml_mode is true, 1-length arrays are converted to scalars on return from patch().

Tests

Some tests are in a submodule (https://github.com/json-patch/json-patch-tests). Do 'git submodule init' to pull these, then 'php runtests.php' to run them.