[snip]The crux of it is: > > $focus = &$focus[$name]; > [/snip] It works as I expect so far. All I have to do is figure out how to make the element a name: element in the JSON. for instance an element would look like this { name: "Bob", children: [] } So the PHP array would have to look like this - $json = array ( name => "Bob", children => array ( name => "Angie" ) ) and so on. This is for one of the services that will consume the JSON.