In a new post today, Clay Loveless talks about some issues he's been having with PHP and JSON, specifically with the JSON encoding method in PHP 5.2.1.

As of PHP 5.2.1, json_decode() no longer follows the published standards for JSON-encoded texts. Why not? For no reason other than the convenience of those ignorant of JSON standards.

His complaint stems from the results of a vat_dump statement - prior to this version it would give a NULL, but now it returns a "bool(true)" value back, resulting in some breakage of previous scripts. He spends the rest of the post explaining his voyage through the JSON world and how things are supposed to behave. He also digs a little deeper into the var_dump issue and why he thinks it's such a bad thing.