Why this JSON is invalid? - json

Question

I have tried to send some emails to my php server as json format,but when I validate that json it shows some error
{"function":"contacts", "parameters": {"emails": "(
"John#mac.com",
"anna#gmail.com",
"hank#mac.com"
)","user_id": "90"},"token":""}
Error shows as -
Parse error on line 4:
...{ "emails": "( "John#ma
----------------------^
Expecting 'STRING', 'NUMBER', 'NULL', 'TRUE', 'FALSE', '{', '['

Answer 1

You need to use square brackets for all arrays. Right now you are using parenthesis and you also start with a quotation indicating a string instead of an array.
Either you want the whole value to be a string in which you should be escaping the quotes within the string with a "\" or you should remove the quote and replace the parenthesis with square brackets.
Note: The syntax highlighting above should hint at where you are going wrong.

Answer 2

You need to change you JSON to the following. Or you need to escape the double quotes surrounding the email addresses.
{"function":"contacts", "parameters": {"emails": [
"John#mac.com",
"anna#gmail.com",
"hank#mac.com"
],"user_id": "90"},"token":""}

Answer 3

Your emails element is being defined as a string starting with "( and ending with )".
Inside that string, you then have separate strings each starting and ending with quote marks.
This is obviously incorrect.
What you probably intended is "emails" : [ ...... ]
(... unless you actually intended for the emails element to be a string, in which case the quotes within it need to be escaped as \", as do the line feeds as \n. but I don't think that's what you intended, is it?).
That's why you're getting a syntax error.
However I guess The key point here is that issues like this demonstrate why it is a bad idea to hand-write JSON code (or indeed other text-based syntaxes like XML). You should always use an encoder or decoder to create your JSON strings from within the language you're working with. This will avoid you ever having to deal with issues like this; if you use an encoder, your JSON will always be valid; you don't need to worry about it.
Hope that helps.

Answer 4

Your array appears to be delimited with "(...)" instead of [..]. Among other things, this makes the strings inside it "inside out". If you meant for it to be a quoted string that just resembles an array, you'll need to escape the quotes inside it, like foo \"and\" bar. The flow-chart at http://www.json.org/ is really quite useful, as it is a very small spec.

Answer 5

I am guessing you want:
{
"function":"contacts",
"parameters": {
"emails": [
"John#mac.com",
"anna#gmail.com",
"hank#mac.com"
],
"user_id": "90"
},
"token":""
}