Michael Nitschinger has a new post to his blog about JSON handling in PHP and how to work with it "like a boss".

There are already lots of tutorials out there on handling JSON with PHP, but most of them don't go much deeper than throwing an array against json_encode and hoping for the best. This article aims to be a solid introduction into JSON and how to handle it correctly in combination with PHP. Also, readers who don't use PHP as their programming language can benefit from the first part that acts as a general overview on JSON.

He starts with an introduction to JSON - what it is and what a typical structure looks like. He moves into how to encode JSON in PHP using json_encode, showing teh result of encoding things like arrays, strings and associative arrays. He also includes a bit on translating an object and the resulting JSON string. He mentions the options bitmasks, shows how to decode JSON you're given and talks about error handling and testing of the results.