Question

I have the following json string inside an associative array:

[watch] => '{"tv":"Dexter's Labratory, \u05d1\u05d9\u05d3\u05d5\u05e8  \u05d9\u05e9\u05e8\u05d0\u05dc\u05d9 HOT, South Park, \u05e2\u05e1\u05e4\u05d5\u05e8, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Simpsons, The Samurai Pizza Cats, Dr. House, Futurama, House","movies":"Mufasa, Simba, \u05d7\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd \u05d1\u05e1\u05e8\u05d8, \u05e1\u05e8\u05d8\u05d9\u05dd \u05d7\u05d3\u05e9\u05d9\u05dd \u05d1\u05e7\u05d5\u05dc\u05e0\u05d5\u05e2, Future Shorts Israel, The Lion King"}'

Of course it needs to be escaped because it contains characters like ‘ inside (e.g Dexter’s Labratory). The problem is that after using mysql_real_escape_string on it the output is:

[watch] => \'{\"tv\":\"Dexter\'s Labratory, \\u05d1\\u05d9\\u05d3\\u05d5\\u05e8  \\u05d9\\u05e9\\u05e8\\u05d0\\u05dc\\u05d9 HOT, South Park, \\u05e2\\u05e1\\u05e4\\u05d5\\u05e8, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Simpsons, The Samurai Pizza Cats, Dr. House, Futurama, House\",\"movies\":\"Mufasa, Simba, \\u05d7\\u05d9\\u05d9\\u05dd \\u05d1\\u

It escapes a shitload of stuff that should not be escaped, especially all the ” characters (that I am pretty sure are part of the json encoding) making it not query-able.
What’s the right method to escape a json string? I guess I am missing something here.

Answer 1

You shouldn’t use already prepared JSON string.

You should use json_encode(); function to create your JSON string from array or object.

It’s automatically escapes special characters. Or you can simply define in third argument of this function what to escape. Here is the PHP DOCs.