Question

Something weird is going on, my AJAX Request is returning a array but the whole thing is a string itself.

This basically sums it up:

PHP

$item = array();

$item[] = array(
    'title'     => 'awesome title',
    'permalink' => 'some url'
);

json_encode($item);

jQuery

$.ajax({
    type: 'post',
    url: ajaxurl,
    data: {
        action: 'a_grid_callback',
        type: method
    },
    success: function(msg) {
        console.debug(msg);
    }
});  

The debug returns this:

[{"title":"awesome title","permalink":"some url"}]0

If I was to do alert(msg.length) I would get a long number equivalent to the length of the code above.

Answer 1

Try to set dataType: 'json' Looks like the browser is interpreting the response as a string.