I’ve pimped the minijson code in EvolvisForge to be a full-blown JSON encoder and decoder (lexer/parser) now. You wouldn’t believe just how much is broken in PHP (its own json_encode handles floats wrong in most locales, and mb_check_encoding doesn’t check the encoding of a multibyte string… at least, unlike Python, PHP manages to get 8bit okay though).
Anyway, thought you want to know. If you ever need a Pure PHP JSON encoder/decoder, you know where to look. It’s 100% my code (although written during dayjob, so the exploitation rights are with tarent GmbH). Current licence is GPLv2+ or AGPLv3+. If you spot any bugs, you know where to report them. I think it should be good though. (Do note that JSON is case-sensitive, so “NULL”, “True” and “\N” or “\U20AC” are not valid, “null”, “true”, “\n” and “\u20AC” or “\u20ac” are.)
I plan to store the “art_cust123” information in the user_prefs table in JSON now, instead of ‘|’-separated values, to avoid problems like these we had with broken database format and subsequent corruption of values, by using a dictionary (JSON Object) instead.
The ECMA 262 standard (ECMAscript and JSON) is freely available, though. JSON is also additionally specified in RFC 4627 which differs slightly (see my notes for details, mostly the goal element).
Update: fixed links