Output Firefox JSON data

Question

Is it possible to output specific JSON data (exported from Firefox bookmarks) using PHP.

This is the code which I have so far, it will re-encode the data as Firefox doesn't export it in the correct UTF-8 way. I also remove the trailing , from the end of the file.

<?php
// Read the file blah blah
$hFile = "../uploads/james.json";
$hFile = file_get_contents($hFile);
$hFile = utf8_encode($hFile);
// Remove the trailing comma because Firefox is lazy!!!!
$hFile = substr($hFile, 0, strlen($hFile)-3) . "]}";

$hDec = json_decode(fixEncoding($hFile));

foreach($hDec['uri'] as $hURI) {
    // Output here
}

// Fixes the encoding to UTF-8
function fixEncoding($in_str) {
    $cur_encoding = mb_detect_encoding($in_str);
    if($cur_encoding == "UTF-8" && mb_check_encoding($in_str,"UTF-8")){
        return $in_str;
    }else{
        return utf8_encode($in_str);
    }
}
?>

I have been unable to get any output apart from the whole data, using var_dump.

Answer 1

As VolkerK says, you have to strip the commas before both ] and }:

// ... row 7
// Remove the trailing comma because Firefox is lazy
$hFile = preg_replace('/,\s*([\]}])/m', '$1', $hFile);

// ... or using str_replace
$hFile = str_replace(',]', ']', str_replace(',}', '}', $hFile));

But, the way you are trying to access the URI's of the bookmarks (which I assume is what you are trying to do) wouldn't work.

Recheck the format/schema of the file.

Answer 2

While json_decode() is able to decode

<?php
$c = '{"title":""}';
$bookmarks = json_decode($c);
var_dump($bookmarks);

it fails on

$c = '{"title":"",}';

The "empty" element at the end throws the parser off. And that's exactly what my bookmarks.json looks like

{"title":"", ... "children":[]},]}

edit: json.org links to Comparison of php json libraries. And according to their comparison chart e.g. zend json should be able to parse firefox' bookmark.json. Haven't tested it though.

edit2: why not simply test it....? Yes, zend json is able to parse the unmodified bookmarks.json

require 'Zend/Json.php';


$encodedValue = file_get_contents('Bookmarks 2009-05-24.json');
$phpNative = Zend_Json::decode($encodedValue);
var_dump($phpNative);

prints

array(7) {
  ["title"]=>
  string(0) ""
  ["id"]=>
...
      ["children"]=>
      array(0) {
      }
    }
  }
}