An easy fix (and workaround, paste this code in LocalSettings.php):
if(!function_exists('json_decode')) {

function json_decode($val) {
        $json = new Services_JSON(SERVICES_JSON_LOOSE_TYPE);
        return $json->decode($val);
}

}

Here's what I did on CentOS to get json installed, for the record:

• yum install php-devel gcc
• wget http://pecl.php.net/get/json
• tar xvfz json-1.2.1.tgz
• cd json-1.2.1
• phpize
• ./configure
• make install
• Edit php.ini, add extension=json.so to the extensions section
• service httpd restart

(In reply to comment #1)

An easy fix (and workaround, paste this code in LocalSettings.php):
if(!function_exists('json_decode')) {

function json_decode($val) {
        $json = new Services_JSON(SERVICES_JSON_LOOSE_TYPE);
        return $json->decode($val);
}

}

This would be a very good way to go about this, similar to what we do iconv, mb_strlen, etc.

We've got a fair number of places using ApiFormatJson::getJsonEncode() right now (a wrapper which checks if json_encode is present and non-buggy, then runs either through json_encode or the Services_JSON class) but there's no equivalent wrapper for decoding.

I would probably recommend breaking our Services_JSON copy out of the api dir and have nice global wrapper methods for both encoding and decoding which aren't API-specific...

(Using a class static method is friendly to the autoloader and means we don't have to worry about defining the function if we're not going to use it; it also avoids worrying about whether we're going to break something else that sees our fake json_encode() and thinks that something else is available which isn't.)

Note that our preexisting Xml::encodeJsVar() is basically a simple JSON encoder as well (though currently it produces extra spacing and doesn't handle associative arrays right). We should probably merge some of these things together...

Xml::jsonEncode() and Xml::jsonDecode() maybe? Or we could break them out to a new class with a nice clean name... FormatJson::encode() and FormatJson::decode() ?

mdale wrote:

Oky broken out into the global functions file simple class with static methods FormatJson::encode() and FormatJson::decode() replaced instances where json availability was assumed or was calling the static ApiFormatJson method. in r56116