[mmosta]

  - JSON:
  . Added JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR flag. (Andrea)

A blessed day, prior to this, json_decode would simply return null on error.

[LeonM]

Absolutely, before you had to do some check like:

if(null === $data = json_decode($json)) throw new Exception();

[rollcat]

Wrong! "null" is a valid JSON-serialized value! You MUST call json_last_error.

Better yet - don't use PHP.