This post is slightly misleading and also 6 months old, it's a Debian issue not a PHP issue. Tim, if you had upgraded from the version provided by php.net

This post is slightly misleading and also 6 months old, it's a Debian issue not a PHP issue. Tim, if you had upgraded from the version provided by php.net you would not have seen a problem. We have not removed json and we will never release a version of php without json support built in. Any changes in 5.5 is due to whatever distro packaging you are using which we have no control over. https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63520 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63520