This took me a few minutes today to work out and find an answer on Google so I thought I’d share it.
I had a string that I was posting from a form and while Firebug on the client said that the string was valid, on the server side PHP’s json_decode() function was returning me a NULL indicating invalid JSON. I spit out the string using good old var_dump() and I could see straight away that I would need to strip some slashes from it, but I couldn’t figure out why.
I don’t like to simply know how to fix something, I like to know why it was broken in the first place! A bit of Googling gave me the answer, it turned out to be because of the magic_quotes setting in PHP.
Instead of just wrapping everything in a stripslashes() call I decided to write a wrapper function that will take into account whether magic_quotes is on or off. It will also allow me to do whatever I want later one if I wanted to parse a particular type of data or something.
Here is the code. As you can see it’s nothing fancy, but it works and hopefully it saves people some time.
function _json_decode($string) {
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$string = stripslashes($string);
}
return json_decode($string);
}
Excellent – this has saved me some time. I was having trouble working out why a json_encoded object could not then be immediately json_decoded.
You are the MAN! I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why json_decode was working great on my local server but once moved to my webserver it kept coming out NULL.
Thank you!
Thanks for this simple but excellent help :-)
I had big headache this night. But now it works again :-)
God bless you!
Magic quotes are evil, can’t imagine why anyone would leave it on by default.
Thanks for the info. I switched PHP distribution (to entropy) for my local server and couldn’t figure out why json_encode stopped working. Turned out magic quotes was turned on. *shudders*
Muchas gracias amigo !
Thank you a lot, this fixed my site!
Thanks dude, after an hour googling you gave me the correct answer… :)
Yes! Thank you!! I owe you a beer next time I’m in Perth.
This has taken me hours to figure out, and I’ve utter more swear words at this damn thing than I care to admit.
Problem solved. Thanks for posting this!
Hi, Thanks for this post. I’ve been scratching my head for the afternoon on this one, a piece of code using json_decode() was working on my local server but not when I put it online.
just a little modification :)
function _json_decode($string, $flag = false) {
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$string = stripslashes($string);
}
return json_decode($string, $flag);
}
You da man! I don’t enjoy debugging AJAX, and this saved my butt.
Awesome! Thanks for preventing me from banging my head.
thanks dear, its really helpfull…