I, likewise was reading from a DB (PostgreSQL) and everything was a string. We loop over each row and do things with it to build up our final results array, so I used
$result_arr[] = array($db_row['name'], (int)$db_row['count']);
within the loop to force it to be an integer value. When I do json_encode($result_arr)
now, it correctly formats it as a number. This allows you to control what is and is not a number coming from your database.
EDIT:
The json_encode()
function also has the ability to do this on the fly using the JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK
flag as a second argument to it. You need to be careful using it though as shown in this users example in the documentation (copied below): http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php#106641
<?php
// International phone number
json_encode(array('phone_number' => '+33123456789'), JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK);
?>
And then you get this JSON:
{"phone_number":33123456789}