Handling malformed JSON in PHP

Question

I\'m trying to write a php script that handles data from a webservice that delivers \"json\" as a string. The problem is the string isn\'t really json; it\'s javascript. Spe

Answer 1

Ok. try to use this. http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=198 I just check your string

Answer 2

Depends on how complicated your data is :

$output = "{desc:'User defined payload',asc:'whatever'}";

function json_js_php($string){

    $string = str_replace("{",'{"',$string);
    $string = str_replace(":'",'":"',$string);
    $string = str_replace("',",'","',$string);
    $string = str_replace("'}",'"}',$string);
    return $string;

}

echo json_decode(json_js_php($output))->{'desc'}; 

returns : User defined payload

Answer 3

If the problem is just the unquoted identifiers and the data can be assumed not to contain any curly brackets, this should do it:

$goodJson = preg_replace("/{\s*([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/", '{ "$1"', $badJson);

(not tested!)

Answer 4

Using regexp is a no-go. JSON grammar cannot be correctly parsed using regexp. You will open yourself to a ton of future bugs.

I recommend using some kind of a YAML parser. YAML is backwards-compatible with JSON and allows unquoted literals at the same time.

Symfony YAML component worked great for me.

And remember that there will be a performance penalty in comparison to json_decode because it's implemented natively.

Answer 5

Try this:

$jsonString = "{result:true,username:'usr000242',password:'123456',message:'Cannot send username and password to email@test.com'}";
function manualFixInvalidJSON($jsonString=''){
    $jsonString = preg_replace("/([{,])([a-zA-Z][^: ]+):/", "\$1\"$2\":", $jsonString);
    $jsonString = preg_replace("/:([a-zA-Z\'][^:]+)([,}])/", ":\"$1\"$2", $jsonString);
    $jsonString = json_decode($jsonString,true);
    function trimer($val){
        return trim(trim($val,"'"),"\"");
    }
    $jsonString = array_map('trimer', $jsonString);
    return json_encode($jsonString);
}
echo jsonString($jsonString);