PHP-Parse this String

Question

I've a got this string after parsing webpage. It looks something similar to this, which is not a valid format of JSON. I was wondering if I can parse this string to get desired values.

string(4747) " _result_ ={status:"OK",loc:"India",
country:{regions:[{ap:"755",mp:"768"},{up:"125",mh:"188"}]},src:"gov"}"

Here you can observe that, the fieldNames doesn't have quotes at all. I've tried to json_decode() which returned NULL. So, Please help me in parsing this string. Thank you.

Answer 1

The field names don't need to have quotes if they are just single-word strings. The problem is likely right at the beginning:

" _result_ ="

That's the problem. Try str_replace(' _result_ =', '', $string); and see if it will decode then.