What are the best practices for handling and displaying JSON data in PHP?

When handling and displaying JSON data in PHP, it is important to properly encode and decode the data to ensure it is formatted correctly. To handle JSON data in PHP, you can use the json_encode() function to convert a PHP array into a JSON string and json_decode() function to convert a JSON string into a PHP array. When displaying JSON data, you can use the header() function to set the content type to 'application/json' and then echo the JSON data.

// Example of encoding a PHP array to JSON
$data = array('name' => 'John', 'age' => 30);
$jsonData = json_encode($data);

// Example of decoding JSON data to a PHP array
$jsonString = '{"name": "John", "age": 30}';
$decodedData = json_decode($jsonString, true);

// Example of displaying JSON data
header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo $jsonData;