Using the Perl module JSON to create a JSON object

Question

I'm having a killer time trying to create a JSON object to return to a jQuery request.

I'm trying to use the jQuery chained select module

and I'm trying to create the JSDN object using Perl's JSON module.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong or how I can even debug it, about the best I can do is get a JS dialog box coming up with "A unknown error....".

This is all I was trying to do to create the JSON object, I thought this would be all that is needed, but it's not. Any ideas?

TIA

use JSON;
my %data = (1 => 'val1',
            2 => 'val2',
            3 => 'val3',
           );
my $json_text = to_json(\%data);
print $json_text;

Answer 1

Running the script gives:

{"1":"val1","3":"val3","2":"val2"}

… which is the expected output.

The problem almost certainly lies with whatever code you are using to get the JSON from your server to the client.

Answer 2

Have the javascript output the response text before processing to a textarea so you can see if there's something failing in transport. Also, you're going to want to put something in front of the data, like "myVar= " so that the data is assigned to something on the other end.

Answer 3

Thanks all for the help - I guess the problem was simply the JSON module, it wasn't creating the OBJ for some reason. I tried JSON::Any and it work fine.

Thanks Again!

Answer 4

Looks like you already figured it out your issue, and if you were wondering why it wasn't working is because the to_json method is not exported from JSON.pm in the older versions of the JSON module. The latest version on CPAN (2.0) exports to_json into your namespace but versions ~1.5 don't and require the JSON::. Many repos still carry this older version, and if you are running on CentOS ~5.3 or an older version of Fedora Core you will have the older JSON.pm.