Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46600&edit=1
ID: 46600
Comment by: matt at mpcm dot com
Reported by: Matt at mpcm dot com
Summary: "_empty_" key in objects (see #41504)
Status: No Feedback
Type: Bug
Package: JSON related
Operating System: *
PHP Version: 5CVS, 6CVS (2008-11-18)
Block user comment: N
Private report: N
New Comment:
Looking at that same doc:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159#section-1
"A string is a sequence of zero or more Unicode characters [UNICODE]."
Previous Comments:
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[2016-03-23 07:43:13] yohgaki@php.net
Property names are defined as "string" and "string" is defined as follows.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159#section-7
string = quotation-mark *char quotation-mark
char = unescaped /
escape (
%x22 / ; " quotation mark U+0022
%x5C / ; \ reverse solidus U+005C
%x2F / ; / solidus U+002F
%x62 / ; b backspace U+0008
%x66 / ; f form feed U+000C
%x6E / ; n line feed U+000A
%x72 / ; r carriage return U+000D
%x74 / ; t tab U+0009
%x75 4HEXDIG ) ; uXXXX U+XXXX
escape = %x5C ; \
quotation-mark = %x22 ; "
unescaped = %x20-21 / %x23-5B / %x5D-10FFFF
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159#section-4
Object property name should be unique. i.e. "The names within an object SHOULD be unique."
I cannot tell if "" is valid or not. Is it valid JSON?
BTW, the name for empty elements should be "__empty" or "__empty__" as we
usually "__name" or "__name__" for reserved names.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2016-03-23 02:49:25] ofbeaton at gmail dot com
So I just ran into this problem while making a satis repository script for composer. I don't
see a good solution.
If I $composerJson = json_decode($composerJson, true) into associative arrays,
manipulate it, then json_encode($composerJson) then my
"require-dev": {}
turns into
"require-dev": []
which composer chokes on. So obviously I can't read the composer file as associative arrays!
That isn't this bug, I just want to show upfront that using the associative array parameter on
my json_decode cannot solve my problem.
So I do: $composerJson = json_decode($composerJson, false) and turn it into objects
like this thread talks about. Except the most common composer.json contains something like this:
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"": "src/"
}
}
it reads it in fine, but when I do json_encode($composerJson) again... I get:
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"_empty_": "src/"
}
}
which composer then chokes on because of course "_empty_" has a different meaning than
"".
So I'm stuck doing a json_encode then using a hack, $composerJson =
str_replace('"_empty_":', '"":', $composerJson)
before writing it to file again.
The _empty_ key does not seem to me to be the right answer here. Should composer change the way
composer files for virtually all projects be written? Is this a composer bug?
Or should json_encode and json_decode objects reproduce a blank key?
I hope the answer is the later, but I cannot say for sure.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2016-01-25 14:56:31] ajf@php.net
This is arguably not a bug since you can't have objects with empty property names, so this is
necessary to allow decoding JSON objects with empty keys. However, that's a rather arbitrary
restriction. If we removed it, we could fix this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2014-01-14 18:50:41] matt at mpcm dot com
Last post was a bad example, this is the actual output:
as object: {"_empty_":"c"}
as array: {"_empty_":"a","":"c"}
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2014-01-14 18:48:23] matt at mpcm dot com
With an output of:
as object: {"_empty_":"c"}
as array: {"_empty_":"b","":"c"}
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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