http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1083963


in reply to understanding json in perl

JSON is, of course, merely a data-format.   In much younger and more innocent days, it was favored because it basically is JavaScript, and sites could (and did!) merely exec it.   Today, you use a CPAN module such as JSON (as previously shown) both to encode and to decode the data.   (Safely.)   What you get is a Perl data structure, namely a hash.