100M-Row Challenge with PHP

Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by semiquaver on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:10AM (#47152572)

Are they just confused about what characters require escaping in JSON strings or is PHP weirder than I remember?

    {
        "\/blog\/11-million-rows-in-seconds": {
            "2025-01-24": 1,
            "2026-01-24": 2
        },
        "\/blog\/php-enums": {
            "2024-01-24": 1
        }
    }

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by idoubtit on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:54AM (#47154135)

The weirdness is partly in JSON . In the JSON spec, the slash (named "solidus" there) is the only character that can be written plainly or prefixed with a backslash (AKA "reverse solidus").

See page 4, section 9 of the latest ECMA for JSON: https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-404_2...

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by daviddoran on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:49AM (#47153147)

PHP has always escaped forward slashes to help prevent malicious JSON from injecting tags into JavaScript I believe. Because it was common for PHP users to json_encode some data and then to write it out into the HTML in a script tag. A malicious actor could include a closing script tag, and then could inject their own HTML tags and scripts etc.

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by CapitaineToinon on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:15AM (#47152652)

That's the default output when using json_encode with the JSON_PRETTY_PRINT flag in php.

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by idoubtit on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:44AM (#47154007)

> That's the default output when using json_encode with the JSON_PRETTY_PRINT flag in php.

JSON_PRETTY_PRINT is irrelevant. Escaping slashes is the default behavior of json_encode(). To switch it off, use JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES.

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by CapitaineToinon on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @12:51PM (#47155007)

Ah, my bad. Thanks for the correction, TIL!

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by poizan42 on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:13AM (#47152618)

> The output should be encoded as a pretty JSON string.

So apparently that is what they consider "pretty JSON". I really don't want to see what they would consider "ugly JSON".

(I think the term they may have been looking for is "pretty-printed JSON" which implies something about the formatting rather than being a completely subjective term)

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Re:100M-Row Challenge with PHP by ourmandave on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @01:38PM (#47155777)

Pretty JSON not meaning formatting, but more "That was pretty JSON of you."

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