Monday, October 21, 2013

Fixing json_encode() Problem in PHP 5.5 on Ubuntu 13.10

I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 over the weekend and everything went pretty well. It automatically brings PHP 5.5 with it, too. When I tried to run a web app I was working on, though, I received this message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_encode()

I subsequently Googled around and came across a highly-ranked blog article which makes it sound like PHP 5.5 drops support for json_encode because of some silly licensing argument. The truth is, PHP 5.5 does NOT drop support for json_encode. For a much better and much clearer explanation, I recommend reading this article.

Now, enough of the balleyhoo! How do we fix it?

It was was easy! Install the php5-json package and restart Apache. Voilà!

sudo apt-get install php5-json
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Note that the author of the blog article linked above mentions that re-installing the php5-dev pacakged fixed his woes. While that didn't help me, you may want to give it a try if the above didn't help you.
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 23, 2014 at 3:53 PM

    Awesome thanks for posting this!

    I didn't receive an error at all, but this problem was screwing with the page load speeds of one of my dev WordPress installations.

    It's now fixed by specifically installing php5-json, Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 14, 2014 at 1:27 PM

    Hi everyone,

    I've been having trouble with the son_encode for quite some time now, and I finally figured it out.

    You simply have to make sure that your connection as well as the file is uff-8 encoded. The connection used to be irrelevant before PHP 5.5.

    Kind regards

    ReplyDelete