Embed JSON string without extra escape

[bobvandevijver]

Q	A
Bug report?	no
Feature request?	no
BC Break report?	no
RFC?	no

I have an object which contains a couple of file reference, one of which is a JSON file. I want to serialize this object into JSON, but the not serialize the JSON string again.

I'm already using a custom serialization handler to convert the files into their string representation.

$visitor->visitProperty(
        new StaticPropertyMetadata('', 'field', NULL),
        $object->file->getContents());

This results in:

{
  "field": "[{\"id\": 1, \"prop\": 1}]"
}

Instead of the wanted:

{
  "field": [{"id": 1, "prop":1}]
}

I have now fixed this with a smallworkaround (using json_decode to deserialize the JSON string first), but is there a way to do this without the extra deserialize/serialize roundtrip?

$visitor->visitProperty(
        new StaticPropertyMetadata('', 'field', NULL),
        json_decode($object->file->getContents(), true));

[goetas]

The way you did is the right one. The internal data structure requires an array, that will be converted later in json.