[captainmuon]

Many people here wondering how you can end up with JSON this bad, and who is "sending" it to them. Well, the poster is not neccessarily running a REST service. At work, I've dealt with plenty of little JSON (and XML) files, created by "little tools" and passed around via files and pipes. Since I work in science, most of our coders are the users of their code, so you can imagine both code quality and UX are poor. And the main reason something like this happens is that people don't use proper serialization, because they never heard of it, or they don't have the right tools. They just construct JSON by string interpolation. If they are lucky, they remember to replace `'` with `\"`. In fact, that looks a lot like what happened here (plus one or two levels of escaping).

Appropos escaping, people are most likely to do this if they never wrote PHP websites as kids and never went through `urlencode` and `mysql_escape_string` hell.