I've been playing a bit with BaseX the last couple of days - and very excited about the product while doing so - but now I am having problems outputting JSON from a PHP script.

I have this XQuery:

declare option output:method "json";
declare option output:json "format=jsonml";
<json type="object">
{
for $user in collection("saveresult")//user[_id="1f2cda8f-a18a-44ba-8d17-73626d472306"]
return
<testResults>
  <testId>{$user/test/_id}</testId>
  <grade>{$user/user_info/user_grade}</grade>
  </testResults>
}
</json>
In the BaseX GUI this yields:

["json", {"type":"object"},  
  ["testResults",
    ["testId",
      ["_id",
        "Bio-1"]],
    ["grade",
      ["user_grade",
        "7"]]],
  ["testResults",
    ["testId",
      ["_id",
        "Bio-2"]],
    ["grade",
      ["user_grade",
        "1"]]]]
Which is what I expected after reading about the JSONML format. (Not too happy with that format, but that's another story).

Running exactly the same XQuery form within a PHP script however yields this:

<json type="object">
  <testResults>
    <testId>
      <_id>Bio-1</_id>
    </testId>
    <grade>
      <user_grade>7</user_grade>
    </grade>
  </testResults>
  <testResults>
    <testId>
      <_id>Bio-2</_id>
    </testId>
    <grade>
      <user_grade>1</user_grade>
    </grade>
  </testResults>
</json>
(script is attached; note that the $ signs have been escaped there so that PHP will not try to evaluate them)

In other words, the result is being output as XML with an enclosing <json> root tag, not as JSON.

What is happening here? And how can I have BaseX return JSON from PHP?

Paul Swennenhuis