jQuery $.ajax to pass multidimensional array to PHP

I am using jQuery and PHP to write JSON data to my server. I'm processing a decent amount of repeating numeric data (~.75kb), so I want to pass the data to PHP in the form of a multidimensional array.

At the moment I cannot manage to get the data to PHP in a form that it can recognize. I've tried various combinations of sending/receiving as arrays and objects with no success.

The best case scenario would be one in which I pass a the array to the PHP and the PHP converts it to a readable form. I'd rather not use associative arrays or any serializing on the part of the Javascript.

Code... This is giving me a 500 internal server error, which no longer occurs if I omit the passed data variable. (I'm not yet using $data in the php file yet because I know it's not working.)

function generateData() {
  // code here
  return [ one[ sub_one[], sub_two[] ], two[], three[], four[] /* Etc... */ ]
}
function saveData() {
    $.ajax({
        url: "scripts/save.php",
        data开发者_JAVA百科: {
            "area":"testing",
            "location":"testing",
            "name":"testing",
            "data":generateData()
        }
    });
}

<?php
    $area = $_GET['area'];
    $location = $_GET['location'];
    $name = $_GET['name'];
    $data = $_GET['data']);

    # Performing operations with variables...

    echo 1;
?>

Thanks for any help you can offer.

---

Found a solution:

"data": {
    data: generateCellData()
}

The above code passes data as an object to PHP, whereby I can access the original array as $data("data"). I'm still somewhat baffled by why this works when I'm already passing the data and other parameters as an object.