Getting Sphider to output JSON

Question

I've recently added the Sphider crawler to my site in order to add search functionality. But the default search.php that comes with the distribution of Sphider that I downloaded is too plain and doesn't integrate well with the rest of my site. I have a little navigation bar at the top of the site which has a search box in it, and I'd like to be able to access Sphider's search results through that search field using Ajax. To do this, I figure I need to get Sphider to return its results in JSON format.

The way I did that is I used a "theme" that outputs JSON (Sphider supposts "theming" its output). I found that theme on this thread on Sphider's site. It seems to work, but more strict JSON parsers will not parse it. Here's some example JSON output:

{"result_report":"Displaying results 1 - 1 of 1 match (0 seconds) ", "results":[ { "idented":"false", "num":"1", "weight":"[100.00%]", "link":"http://www.avtainsys.com/articles/Triple_Contraints", "title":"Triple Contraints", "description":" on 01/06/12 Project triple constraints are time, cost, and quality. These are the three constraints that control the performance of the project. Think about this triple-constraint as a three-leg tripod. If one of the legs is elongated or", "link2":"http://www.avtainsys.com/articles/Triple_Contraints", "size":"3.3kb" }, { "num":"-1" } ], "other_pages":[ { "title":"1", "link":"search.php?query=constraints&start=1&search=1&results=10&type=and&domain=", "active":"true" }, ] }

The issue is that there is a trailing comma near the end. According to this, "trailing commas are not allowed" when using PHP's json_decode() function. This JSON also failed to parse using this online formatter. But when I took the comma out, it worked and I got this better-formatted JSON:

{
   "result_report":"Displaying results 1 - 1 of 1 match (0 seconds) ",
   "results":[
      {
         "idented":"false",
         "num":"1",
         "weight":"[100.00%]",
         "link":"http://www.avtainsys.com/articles/Triple_Contraints",
         "title":"Triple Contraints",
         "description":" on 01/06/12 Project triple constraints are time, cost, and quality. These are the three constraints that control the performance of the project. Think about this triple-constraint as a three-leg tripod. If one of the legs is elongated or",
         "link2":"http://www.avtainsys.com/articles/Triple_Contraints",
         "size":"3.3kb"
      },
      {
         "num":"-1"
      }
   ],
   "other_pages":[
      {
         "title":"1",
         "link":"search.php?query=constraints&start=1&search=1&results=10&type=and&domain=",
         "active":"true"
      }
   ]
}

Now, how would I do this programmatically? And (perhaps more importantly), is there a more elegant way of accomplishing this? And you should know that PHP is the only language I can run on my shared hosting account, so a Java solution for example would not work for me.

Answer 1

In search_result.html, you can surround the , at the end of the foreach loop with condition to only print if the index is strictly less than the number of pages - 1.