ok, thanks to everyone for the answers. I can now see why there is no jQuery method to decode a JSON string: the eval is done implicitly, since underlyingly, a script is requested when doing an Ajax JSON request. Got that, and yes, if your source is trusted, then maybe eval() is really the way to go, and it would probably be hard to improve in terms of speed. The jQuery source for 1.2.3 does that around line 2854, so that should be ok.
On the other hand, and contrary to my initial assumption, jQuery apparently does not have any code to formulate a JSON query; the $.ajax() method simply appends the data argument to the request URL if data is a string, and turns it into a classical ?x=2&y=3 style query string if data is a hash (an object). Means i must include additional code (a plugin) to formulate JSON strings myself. cheers everyone _wolf
