Laravel JSON – A Simple Wrapper Around JSON for Catching Errors

When we wrote PHP 7.3: A Look at JSON Error Handling, Jan Östlund mentioned a package he wrote called Laravel JSON. Laravel JSON is a small package that makes encoding and decoding JSON a breeze with exceptions thrown on error immediately:

A simple wrapper around json_encode() and json_decode() for catching any errors without executing json_last_error().

Here’s the basic usage to encode JSON with this package:

use Eastwest\Json\Facades\Json;
 
$json = Json::encode(['key' => 'value]);
 
$array = Json::decode('{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}');
// Assoc = false
$array = Json::decode('{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}', false);

Returned objects are converted to an associative array by default.

The package immediately throws an exception when an error occurs, and you can catch them with EncodeDecode:

use Eastwest\Json\Exceptions\EncodeDecode;
 
try {
    Json::decode('{bad json');
} catch (EncodeDecode $e) {
    // Handle exception
}

Thank you, Jan, for this excellent package! Jan is also the author of F-Bar, an application for Mac OS and iOS, an app that enables you to manage your Laravel Forge servers on your Mac or your iPhone.

#Learn More

You can check out Jan’s Laravel JSON package on GitHub for installation and usage instructions. I would also suggest reading our post on PHP 7.3: A Look at JSON Error Handling to learn how you can throw and handle JSON errors in PHP 7.3.