Problem: Get below array for example. $status = array ( "message" => "error" , "club_id" => $_club_id , "status" => "1" , "membership_info" => array (), ); This array will be encoded in json format echo json_encode($status); This function return json: {"message":"error","club_id":275,"status":"1","membership_info": [] } Notice the empty array [], it is not consistent, it should be an empty object {} {"message":"error","club_id":275,"status":"1","membership_info": {} } The cause: This problem is caused by the called function array(), which yields an empty array [] Solution: There are 2 solutions for this issue: Solution 1: Call new stdClass instead of array(), stdClass generates an empty object {} Solution 2: The above solution is complex in case there are plenty of arr