How to read a scraped JavaScript object literal (with unquoted keys) “as JSON” in PHP?

Question

I have a json object scraped from a website

{
    area: {
        "lang": "en",
        "area": "25",
        "region": "mea"
    },
    config: {
        "rtl": false,
        "breakpoint": 768
    }
}

due to the season area and config is not enclosed in double quotes php function json_decode retuerns NULL

how to add double quotes in php to area and config if these are not already enclosed in double quotes?

Answer 1

Use a regex replace, (assuming the format).

$json = preg_replace('/([^"\s]+)+: ?{/', '"$1": {', $js_object);

Regex101.com

PHP Sandbox

Edit

For the supplied string, you need to check two more things:

• Make sure that the pattern isn't in a string (eg. "Your selection: {packageName}" )
• Make sure that the backslash character is escaped ( Source )

Here's the updated code:

$js_object = '...';

$json_proper_backslashes = preg_replace('#\\\\([^"\\\\\/bfnrtu])#', '\\\\\\\\$1', $js_object);

$json = preg_replace('/({|},)\s*([^"\s]+): ?{/', '$1"$2": {', $json_proper_backslashes);

$json_object = json_decode($json);