Question

On the server side do I have 2 hashes I encode into JSON strings like so

my $j = JSON->new;
$j = $j->utf8;

my $data;
$data->{users}  = $j->encode(\%user_result);
$data->{owners} = $j->encode(\%owner_result);
$json_string    = to_json($data);

print $cgi->header(-type => "application/json", -charset => "utf-8");
print $json_string;

On the client side I have

$(document).ready(function(){

    $('form').live('submit', function(){

    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: "/cgi-bin/ajax_confirm.pl",
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "json",

        data: $(this).serialize(),

        error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { 
        $('div#create_result').text("responseText: " + XMLHttpRequest.responseText +
                        ", textStatus: " + textStatus +
                        ", errorThrown: " + errorThrown);
        $('div#create_result').addClass("error");
        },

        success: function(result){
        if (result.error) {
            $('div#create_result').text("result.error: " + result.error);
            $('div#create_result').addClass("error");
        } else { // perl script says everything is okay

            var users  = result.users;
            var owners = result.owners;
...

users contains

{"ss":"Sandra Schlichting","fn":"Full name"}

but it is not an array. When I use $.each() it takes on character at a time.

Problem

How do I turn it into an array, so I can use

function makeTable(users) {
    var result = '<table>\n<tr><td>Initials</td><td>Full Name</td></tr>\n';
    $.each(users, function(index, value) {
        result += '<tr><td>' + index + '</td><td>' + value + '</td></tr>\n';
    });
    result += '</table>';
    return (result);
}

which should produce

Initials    Full Name
ss  Sandra Schlichting
fn  Full name

Answer 1

You should use jQuery.getJSON() as mentioned at http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/.

There is also $.parseJSON() method to parse string to json if you want to go that way.