[uf-discuss] Re: Standardized Representation of Microformats in PHP/other languages

[Philip Tellis]

On 03/04/2008, Ciaran McNulty <mail at ciaranmcnulty.com> wrote:

>  There appears to be a Zend::Json package that can decode() JSON -
>  simple testing makes it appear that it parses the JSON output of hKit
>  identically (when told to return an object rather than an array).

I'm jumping on to this a little late, but a few points from my
experience with JSON in php.

1. The php extension for json is significantly faster than the native
PHP implementation (sorry, I don't have tests that I can show).
2. AFAIK, the extension has been around since 4.3 at least, and made
it into mainstream PHP later.
3. By default (in PHP 5), json_decode will return an Object rather
than an associative array.  You need to pass in true as the second
parameter to this function to get it to return an array.  Apart from
this, I have seen no differences since 4.3.
4. json_encode/json_decode are almost as fast as php's built in
serialize and unserialize functions, and result in smaller serialised
representations.