Question

I try to manually build a Json string to send to the client.

{'result':'hhh'}  

When I use

echo json_encode(array('result'=>'hhh')); 

It arrives perfectly. But when I do

echo '{'result':'hhh'}'; 

It isn’t

The only difference I find between the two requests is that the first one has:

Content-Length: 9    header 

and the second one (which does not work)

Content-Length: 16   header 

Both the strings should have been content length: 16!!! I guess it something to do with the combination of ZF and Mootools.

Answer 1

According to the specs, JSON requires double quotes around key names and string values.

echo json_encode(array('result'=>'hhh')); 

will output

{'result':'hhh'} 

The length of this output is 16 bytes as shown by the following:

echo strlen(json_encode(array('result'=>'hhh'))); 

outputs ’16’.

Any JSON decoder that follows the specs will fail or throw an exception when presented with your manually echoed JSON.