option JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING not implemented

[rs324]

2014-06-25 06:54:49 --- EMERGENCY: ErrorException [ 2 ]: json_decode(): option JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING not implemented ~ APPPATH/classes/JWT.php [ 137 ]

my php version is :

PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.1 (cli) (built: Jun 19 2014 20:53:04)
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.3, Copyright (c) 1999-2014, by Zend Technologies

so its looks like this line fails :
(version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5.4.0', '>=') && defined('JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING'))

[jlesueur]

The ubuntu package "php-json" is based on this project: https://github.com/remicollet/pecl-json-c which doesn't support the BIGINT option. The builtin json extension the php project uses has a weird license (cannot be used for evil) so ubuntu doesn't include it by default. The last comment on this bug:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63520
explains how to get the json extension distributed by default with PHP.

[kheaactua]

My solution was to define JSON_C_VERSION in my app when running on a Ubuntu 13.10 box. That seems to tell ::encode to use a preg to deal with bigints rather than use JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING.

Is there anything wrong with this approach?