php json_decode error quoted object property name expected - php

Question

I try to create a script that decoding a simple JSON string in PHP and I get the following error:
quoted object property name expected
The string I try to decode is the following :
{"values":[{"url":"http://www.google.com","matches":"http|www|google|com"},{"url":"http://www.yahoo.com","matches":"http|www|yahoo|com"}]}
and the code I use to decoded is the following:
json_decode( $json_string );
I also have try to validate my json string in some online json validators, and the string seems to be fine.
Can someone please help me ?
Do you think the problem exists because of the double quotes ?
Update #1
Definetelly was a debuging issue. I place my experience here just to help other devs may come accross the same issue in the feature:
The problem was that my variable that came with the json string was html encoded so instead of the following string :
{"values":[{"url":"http://www.google.com","matches":"http|www|google|com"},{"url":"http://www.yahoo.com","matches":"http|www|yahoo|com"}]}
my variable came with the following string inside :
{"values":[{"url":"http://www.google.com","matches":"http|www|google|com"},{"url":"http://www.yahoo.com","matches":"http|www|yahoo|com"}]}
The mistake by my side was that I used the print_r method instead of the var_dump . This had as a result to print out the &quot as " in my page .

Answer 1

The json string is valid, and it works. You can add true for the second parameter of json_decode, and you get back an array.
Try the following:
$json_string = '{"values":[{"url":"http://www.google.com","matches":"http|www|google|com"},{"url":"http://www.yahoo.com","matches":"http|www|yahoo|com"}]}';
var_dump(json_decode($json_string, true));
It works for me.