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

This worked for me, using regex replace '/\s(\w+)\s/i'

$json =  file_get_contents("php://input"); // or whatever json data
$json = preg_replace('/\s(\w+)\s/i', '"$1"', $json);
$json = json_decode($json, true);

Answer 2

Please do not use regexps to do this! JSON grammar cannot be correctly parsed this way by definition. You will open yourself to a ton of future bugs.

I recommend using a YAML parser, because YAML is a superset of JSON and allows unquoted literals at the same time.

Symfony YAML component works great.

There will be a performance penalty in comparison to json_decode which is implemented natively.