note 105259 deleted from function.json-decode by googleguy

Note Submitter: Dragos.U ---- Hmm, using eval without proper escaping of the input value .. will not get you anything good ;) Here is my JSON decode function, it does not decode to PHP object/array but only to an array (can be easily changed anyway). <?php function jsonDecode ($json) { $json = str_replace(array("\\\\", "\\\""), array("&#92;", "&#34;"), $json); $parts = preg_split("@(\"[^\"]*\")|([\[\]\{\},:])|\s@is", $json, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE); foreach ($parts as $index => $part) { if (strlen($part) == 1) { switch ($part) { case "[": case "{": $parts[$index] = "array("; break; case "]": case "}": $parts[$index] = ")"; break; case ":": $parts[$index] = "=>"; break; case ",": break; default: return null; } } else { if ((substr($part, 0, 1) != "\"") || (substr($part, -1, 1) != "\"")) { return null; } } } $json = str_replace(array("&#92;", "&#34;", "$"), array("\\\\", "\\\"", "\\$"), implode("", $parts)); return eval("return $json;"); } ?> How it works: it searches for the "..." (that can be a key or a value) so we need to make sure we do not take into account something like ...\"... that is not the end of the key/value but escaped value for the doublequote. That's why we first replace \\ (escaped backslash) and then we can look for a ...\"... and be sure it's not a ...\\" (the end of the key/value). Next we split the string into chunks, any other characters outside of the "..." only need to be []{},: (and spaces, but those we can throw away). Next we do a little bit of checking on the data, be sure we have valid JSON and replace some of the characters on the way (so we can 'eval' as PHP code later). Then we replace back the initial changed characters and escape $ (!!!) because we will use 'eval' with values of the array (keys and values) in double quotes. (http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php) The function will return NULL for invalid JSON. ;)