php json_decode fails without quotes on key

Question

I have json data represented like this

{key:\"value\"}

(no quotes arround key...)

I want to translate it to an associative array.

Answer 1

To avoid that double quotes are inserted in places where they shouldn't, you should skip those quoted strings in this manipulation.

For instance, if you have this JavaScript object literal in a string:

{
   dt:"2016-10-22T09:13:20",
   "x:y":false
}

... then care must be taken not to have 22T09: change into "22T09":. Also the already quoted key, "x:y" should stay unaltered.

You could use this regular expression for achieving that:

preg_replace('/("(.*?)"|(\w+))(\s*:\s*(".*?"|.))/s', '"$2$3"$4', $text);

Other issues

JavaScript object literals allow numeric constants with left-padded zeroes, like 001, and/or with the unary + sign, which are neither allowed in JSON. To remove those offending characters also, you could use this extended version:

preg_replace('/("(.*?)"|(\w+))(\s*:\s*)\+?(0+(?=\d))?(".*?"|.)/s', '"$2$3"$4$6', $text);