To clarify: I don't understand what the advantage would be, either. It seems that those demanding it somehow confuse or blur the lines between the declaration of data in the language and its representation in a serialization format. A few people in the thread demanded that it be a syntax that could also be consumed by all the JSON parsers out there, and I have no idea how that would be useful at all, since the construct per se isn't useful at all as PHP code and at least needs to be wrapped in <?php and ?> tags, so you couldn't just evaluate it as JavaScript (which would be useless without assignment etc).
I ignored that aspect as others covered it already (e.g. Pierre asking what the
point was of this at all) and focused on the encoding issue that *would* occur
if someone, somehow managed to find a useful way of taking advantage of such a
notation (e.g. where it would be interchangeable with JS code or be evaluated
as JSON by other JSON parsers) - namely the problem that you could produce *PHP
code*, that, with some mingling and stripping, *PHP's own json_decode() could
not process*.
Perhaps I should have made that more clear, sorry.
David
On 04.06.2011, at 03:17, dukeofgaming wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After reading all the debate in the other thread it is still not clear to me
> what the real advantages are of adopting JSON syntax for native PHP
> types. Doing json_encode to an object and expect the code and output to be
> the same seems useless to me, and reading David Zülke's example it seems
> more like a pure-unicode issue to me:
>
> ----
>
> It is different from writing json_decode('ä\u0123'), because json_decode()
> in PHP only accepts UTF-8 encoded input;
>
> Give it a shot:
>
> <?php
> $chr = "\xC3\xA4"; // "ä" as UTF-8
> var_dump(json_decode('["' . $chr . '\u00e4"]'));
> var_dump(json_decode('["' . utf8_decode($chr) . '\u00e4"]'));
> ?>
>
> That'll produce:
>
>> array(1) {
>> [0]=>
>> string(4) "ää"
>> }
>> NULL
>
> Understand what the problem is now?
>
> If someone does this in a latin1-encoded file:
>
> <?php $fancyNewArray = {"yay": "ä"}; ?>
>
> Then that is valid as a PHP array (as it's a latin1 "ä", so \xE4), but
> cannot be consumed by PHP's json_decode(). And that would be terribly
> inconsistent behavior.
>
> -----
>
> It looks more like you want to do json_decode to PHP code hoping that will
> somehow fix json_decode... instead of fixing json_decode.
>
> Could someone advocating this please explain with use-cases and concrete &
> punctualized examples the advantages of having such JSON approach to PHP.
>
> Regards,
>
> David Vega
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
