None of which seem to work.

That's because neither of your examples produces valid JSON strings. To elaborate, strings in JSON are delimited with double quotes, not with single quotes. See http://json.org/.

(Still in general "None of which seem to work." isn't very helpful, you should at least say what happens when you try).

A better approach than blindly (and without looking at the spec) trying stuff would be to either write a minimal JSON implementation of the subset you need, or just copying&pasing code from JSON::PP.

Update: For developement, I have a small script which uses JSON to check the syntax of JSON files. Even if you don't want to install that module everywhere your script is used, you can use it on your development machine for good effect. Here it goes:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use JSON;

die "Usage: $0 <filename>" if @ARGV != 1;

open my $h, '<', $ARGV[0]
    or die "Can't open file '$ARGV[0]' for reading: $!";
my $contents = do { local $/; <$h> };
close $h or warn $!;

my $res = from_json($contents);

# vim: ft=perl
[download]

Thanks, will give that a go :)

Here's a search on CPAN: JSON

Yup, I'm aware of that - but I'm trying to do it without extra perl modules (as its only that single line I need to print, as part of a JS script, which expects a JSON response)

This script is gonna be a "plugin", so I don't want people to have to install extra modules unnecesserily.

TIA

Andy

Hi,

I was having similar problem with to conversion to json on machine where modules cannot be installed. Here is what I end up with (some pieces copied from JSON::PP):

sub to_json {
    my ($ref) = @_;

    if(ref($ref) eq "HASH") {
        return "{".join(",",map { "\"$_\":".to_json($ref->{$_}) } sort
+ keys %$ref)."}";
    }
    elsif(ref($ref) eq "ARRAY") {
        return "[".join(",",map { to_json($_) } @$ref)."]";
    }
    else {
        return "null" if ! defined $ref;
        return $ref   if int($ref) eq $ref;
        my %esc = (
            "\n" => '\n',
            "\r" => '\r',
            "\t" => '\t',
            "\f" => '\f',
            "\b" => '\b',
            "\"" => '\"',
            "\\" => '\\\\',
            "\'" => '\\\'',
        );
        $ref =~ s/([\x22\x5c\n\r\t\f\b])/$esc{$1}/g;
        $ref =~ s/([\x00-\x08\x0b\x0e-\x1f])/'\\u00' . unpack('H2', $1
+)/eg;
        return "\"$ref\"";
    }
}
[download]

Just call it with reference

print to_json({ this => 'that', other => 'whatever' });
[download]

-- hope it helps, Roman