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Perch, Json and textarea

Hi there, I'm using perch to generate json. All going swimmingly well except for when it comes to textareas. My template looks like this


<perch:before>{</perch:before>
"<perch:content id="title" type="text" title="true" label="Client" urlify="true"/>":[
    {"name":"<perch:content id="title" type="text" label="Client" required="true" />",
    "slug":"<perch:content id="title" type="text" label="Client" urlify="true"/>",
    "body":"<perch:content id="body" type="textarea" html="true" label="Body" markdown="true" editor="markitup" required="true" />",
    "thumbnail": "<perch:content type="image" id="thumbnail" label="Thumbnail"/>"
    <perch:if exists="perch_item_last">}]<perch:else />}],</perch:if>
<perch:after>}</perch:after>

Which is fine, until the textarea includes a new line. In which case I get something like:


"bank-side-films":[
    {"name":"Bank Side Films",
    "slug":"bank-side-films",
    "body":"<h2>Heading</h2>

<p>First paragraph</p>",
    "thumbnail": "/admin/resources/bankside-icon.png"
         }

When what I actually need is:


"bank-side-films":[
    {"name":"Bank Side Films",
    "slug":"bank-side-films",
    "body":"<h2>Heading</h2><p>First paragraph</p>",
    "thumbnail": "/admin/resources/bankside-icon.png"
         }

Essentially I need a textarea to parse on one line. Anyone any ideas?
Phil Smith

Phil Smith 0 points

  • 6 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

6 years ago

There's a couple of ways, neither as nice as I'd like.

The first would be to use the skip-template option to get the content back as a PHP array, loop though to get the structure you want and then run it through PHP's own json_encode(). That might jet you the best results, as you'd be using a proper JSON encoding routine rather than rolling your own with the template. But you don't get the template niceties.

Something roughly like:

$data = perch_content_custom('Your region', [
     'skip-template' => true
]);

if (count($data)) {
    $out = [];
    foreach($data as $datum) {
        $item = [];
        $item['name'] = $datum['title'];
        $item['slug'] = PerchUtil::urlify($datum['title']);
        $item['body'] = $datum['body']['processed'];
        // etc...

        $out[$item['slug']] = $item;
    }

    echo json_encode($out);
}

The second option is to do what you're already doing, but to switch out to a custom field type when outputting the textarea to JSON.

This:

"body":"<perch:content id="body" type="textarea" html="true" label="Body" markdown="true" editor="markitup" required="true" />",

would become:

"body":<perch:content id="body" type="textarea_json_encoded" html="true" label="Body" markdown="true" editor="markitup" required="true" />,

and then you'd create perch/addons/fieldtypes/textarea_json_encoded/textarea_json_encoded.class.php like this:

class PerchFieldType_textarea_json_encoded extends PerchFieldType_textarea
{
    public function get_processed($raw=false)
    {
        return json_encode(parent::get_processed($raw));
    }
}
Phil Smith

Phil Smith 0 points

6 years ago

Boom! I'm going with option two and it works a treat.
Robert Ketter

Robert Ketter 103 points

6 years ago

I love this, so I am tagging this response for future use. Robert Ketter
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

6 years ago

Field types are really easy and really, really powerful.