Wrong JSON encoding - PHP cant read it

Question

I have this JSON file

{
 1 : {
 name: "John Doe",
 birthYear: "1990",
 reqion: "USA"
 phone: "604789577", 
 },
 2 : {
 name: "Jose Dirack",
 birthYear: "1970",
 reqion: "Europe"
 phone: "768789577", 
 }
}

And json_decode() is uanble to decode it. Do you see why? Have you any idea how to fix it?

• rodneyrehm: reqion: "USA" phone: "604789577", is missing a comma
• Ayush: JSONLint (jsonlint.com) is a useful tool for such situations.
• T.J. Crowder: "reqion" should probably be "region", although of course that's not what's wrong with the JSON. It's just wrong. :-)

Answer 1

The keys in objects need to be properly encoded strings:

{
 "1" : {
 "name": "John Doe",
 "birthYear": "1990",
 "reqion": "USA",
 "phone": "604789577"
 },
 "2" : {
 "name": "Jose Dirack",
 "birthYear": "1970",
 "reqion": "Europe",
 "phone": "768789577"
 }
}

There was also a typo with the separating commas.

• Timothy Groote: Careful now, there were still some small problems (see my edit)
• T.J. Crowder: +1 for showing the corrected version and linking to the little-known RFC.
• Gumbo: @alex You would just had scrolled down the page you have linked to. There is also a link to the RFC 4627 application/json (although just the plain text format).
• alex: @Gumbo I shall pay more attention to site's footers from here on in.

Answer 2

The keys must be quoted with double quotes as per the JSON spec. If the outer object is meant to be an array, swap the {} with [] and drop the explicit numbering.

You are also missing a comma after reqion.

You also have trailing commas which shouldn't be there.

• T.J. Crowder: Yeah, Crockford really blew it by not allowing trailing commas.

Answer 3

Try this:

[
 {
 "name": "John Doe",
 "birthYear": "1990",
 "reqion": "USA",
 "phone": "604789577" 
 },
 {
 "name": "Jose Dirack",
 "birthYear": "1970",
 "reqion": "Europe",
 "phone": "768789577" 
 }
]