1. Home
  2. Documentation
  3. Serializer
  4. Encoders
WARNING: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 2.8 which is not maintained anymore. Consider upgrading your projects to Symfony 5.0.

Encoders

2.8 version
Maintained
3.4
Unmaintained
2.7 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.0

Encoders

Encoders basically turn arrays into formats and vice versa. They implement EncoderInterface for encoding (array to format) and DecoderInterface for decoding (format to array).

You can add new encoders to a Serializer instance by using its second constructor argument:

1
2
3
4
5
6
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Serializer;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Encoder\XmlEncoder;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Encoder\JsonEncoder;

$encoders = array(new XmlEncoder(), new JsonEncoder());
$serializer = new Serializer(array(), $encoders);

Built-in Encoders

Two encoders are used in the example above:

The XmlEncoder

This encoder transforms arrays into XML and vice versa.

For example, take an object normalized as following:

array('foo' => array(1, 2), 'bar' => true);

The XmlEncoder will encode this object like that:

1
2
3
4
5
6
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<response>
    <foo>1</foo>
    <foo>2</foo>
    <bar>1</bar>
</response>

Be aware that this encoder will consider keys beginning with @ as attributes:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
$encoder = new XmlEncoder();
$encoder->encode(array('foo' => array('@bar' => 'value')));
// will return:
// <?xml version="1.0"?>
// <response>
//     <foo bar="value" />
// </response>

The JsonEncoder

The JsonEncoder is much simpler and is based on the PHP json_encode and json_decode functions.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.