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json_encode() for PHP4 and early PHP5

Had a beauty today. There I was ready to deploy some nicely polished code to the server. After some thorough local testing it looked like it’d be a smooth process. So the code went up, but all my funky AJAX stuff stopped working on the server. How could that be? It was perfect locally… :)

It took a little while but in the end I realised what was going on – json_encode wasn’t working. The server was running PHP 5.1.6 and json_encode only became “standard” with PHP 5.2.0 onward.

I needed a solution fast. No time to recompile a newer version of PHP, add libraries or anything fancy like that. I just needed the function json_encode to work right now. Thankfully, the solution was as easy as adding replacement a function a user kindly submitted from the PHP site itself:

http://au.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php#82904

I blindly assumed PHP 5 was PHP 5. I wasn’t using any extremely fancy commands or anything, but I still came unstuck. So the moral of today is check your server specification right down to every last decimal point! ;)

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Comments Section

8 Responses to “json_encode() for PHP4 and early PHP5”

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  1. 1

    thanks for the link, i was having the same problem.

  2. 2

    Thanks for the link. I got spoiled using json_encode and then had to go back to another project that has to work on older versions of PHP.

  3. 3

    Thanks – me too:) Weird thing is that it gives you a nice 200 OK response with nothing in it.

  4. 4

    It would have been better if you had copied that source code on your blog (but still leave the URL to where you find it – for purposes of giving credit where credit is due).

    I want to that link and was not able to locate item/post #82904 making this post moot.

  5. 6

    sggdfgfgdfg

  6. 7

    Thanks for the Link. it solved my problem

  7. 8

    THANKS A LOT! I was making me crazy. Works perfectly

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