PHP reading invalid json with json_decode(); - php

Question

I have invalid external json data, without double quotes around names.
Example:
{
data: [
{
idx: 0,
id: "0",
url: "http://247wallst.com/",
a: [
{
t: "Title",
u: "http://247wallst.com/2012/07/30/",
sp: "About"
}
],
doc_id: "9386093612452939480"
},
{
idx: 1,
id: "-1"
}
],
results_per_page: 10,
total_number_of_news: 76,
news_per_month: [20, 0, 8, 1, 1, 2, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 5, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 5, 16, 7, 1],
result_start_num: 2,
result_end_num: 2,
result_total_articles: 76
}
As you see a lot of names like data,idx,id,url and others are not double quoted, so this makes this json invalid.
How can I make this external json valid? I already tried str_replace, replacing '{' to '{"' and ':' to '":' adding double quotes around unquoted names, but this messes up some already double quoted variables.
How can I make this json valid so I can read this data with PHP json_decode? I'm not very familiar with preg_replace..
Valid json will look like:
{
"data": [
{
"idx": 0,
"id": "0",
"url": "http://247wallst.com/",
"a": [
{
"t": "Title",
"u": "http://247wallst.com/2012/07/30/",
"sp": "About"
}
],
"doc_id": "9386093612452939480"
},
{
"idx": 1,
"id": "-1"
}
],
"results_per_page": 10,
"total_number_of_news": 76,
"news_per_month": [20, 0, 8, 1, 1, 2, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 5, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 5, 16, 7, 1],
"result_start_num": 2,
"result_end_num": 2,
"result_total_articles": 76
}
Please suggest me some php preg_replace function.
Data source:
http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=aapl&output=json&start=1&num=1

Answer 1

With preg_replace you can do:
json_decode(preg_replace('#(?<pre>\{|\[|,)\s*(?<key>(?:\w|_)+)\s*:#im', '$1"$2":', $in));
Since the above example won't work with real data (the battle plans seldom survive first contact with the enemy) heres my second take:
$infile = 'http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=aapl&output=json&start=1&num=1';
// first, get rid of the \x26 and other encoded bytes.
$in = preg_replace_callback('/\\\x([0-9A-F]{2})/i',
function($match){
return chr(intval($match[1], 16));
}, file_get_contents($infile));
$out = $in;
// find key candidates
preg_match_all('#(?<=\{|\[|,)\s*(?<key>(?:\w|_)+?)\s*:#im', $in, $m, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
$replaces_so_far = 0;
// check each candidate if its in a quoted string or not
foreach ($m['key'] as $match) {
$position = $match[1] + ($replaces_so_far * 2); // every time you expand one key, offsets need to be shifted with 2 (for the two " chars)
$key = $match[0];
$quotes_before = preg_match_all('/(?<!\\\)"/', substr($out, 0, $position), $m2);
if ($quotes_before % 2) { // not even number of not-escaped quotes, we are in quotes, ignore candidate
continue;
}
$out = substr_replace($out, '"'.$key.'"', $position, strlen($key));
++$replaces_so_far;
}
var_export(json_decode($out, true));
But since google offers this data in RSS feed, i would recommend you to use that one if it works for your usecase, this is just for fun (-:

Answer 2

The JSON feeds from Google always seem to be plagued with problems- formatted incorrectly in some way shape or form. If you switch the feed to RSS you can easily convert it to an array or JSON from the array.
<?php
$contents = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=aapl&output=rss&start=1&num=1');
// Convert the RSS to an array (probably just use this)
$arr = simplexml_load_string($contents);
// Or if you specifically want JSON
$json = json_encode($arr);
// And back to an array
print_r(json_decode($json));