Question

When I put this into a json checker, it’s a valid json, but the json_decode in php gives a decode error. json partial:

"regex":{
    "validator":"Regex",
    "options":{
        "pattern":"\/^[a-zA-Z\\.\\- ]+$\/",
        "messages":"Please use letters, spaces, period and dashes only"
    }
}

I looked at Regular expression messing up json_decode(); but that didn’t help me.

Thanks!

Here is the entire json:

Answer 1

This works.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);

$json = '{"regex":{
    "validator":"Regex",
    "options":{
        "pattern":"\\/^[a-zA-Z\\\\.\\\\- ]+$\\/",
        "messages":"Please use letters, spaces, period and dashes only"
    }
}
}';

var_dump(json_decode($json, true));

?>

Notice the entire JSON string was encapsulated with {} and also notice all backslashes were escaped with another backslash (so where regex wants \ we have \\). This works perfect.

NOTE UPDATE:

Just str_replace("\\", "\\\\", $json); and you will be fine. Also, if this is submitted in a form it SHOULD be fine. I just submitted your entire JSON string through an HTML form and sent it directly to json_decode (without escaping) and it worked. This is because the browser escapes backslashes already. So long we are not defining the string within PHP it will be escaped (atleast backslashes)