Dealing with JSONish things in PHP

Question

I'm using PHP to consume a service that is not mine. This service returns things that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike JSON (hat tip, HGG).

i.e., in their simplest form, they look like this

{a: 8531329}

Running the above string through json_decode returns NULL

$foo = json_decode('{a: 8531329}');

The problem is that a isn't quoted.

$foo = json_decode('{"a": 8531329}');

Does PHP (either natively or via common packagist packages) offer me a way to parse this "valid-javascript-but-not-valid-json" string into a PHP array or stdClass? Or will I be parsing this myself? (my example above is a simple case -- actual strings are rather large)

Answer 1

JSON5 may be what you need: https://github.com/colinodell/json5

It deals with all things that object literals in JavaScript are allowed to have while JSON isn't.

Answer 2

If we define the input string as $i:

$i='{a: 8531329}';

We can pre-process it to make it valid JSON with preg_replace:

json_decode(preg_replace('/\{([^:]*):/', '{"\1":', $i))

I would need to see a larger set of what needs to be corrected to provide a complete solution, of course.