How do you properly handle errors when parsing potentially invalid JSON, and how does the JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR flag simplify this compared to manually checking json_last_error?

By default, json_decode returns null if it encounters invalid JSON, but null is also a valid JSON value itself, making it ambiguous whether decoding actually failed or the JSON genuinely contained a null value, which historically required manually checking json_last_error afterward, while passing the JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR flag instead causes json_decode to throw a proper catchable JsonException on failure, letting you handle invalid JSON using a standard try catch block instead of manually checking an error code after every single call.

try {
    $data = json_decode($jsonString, true, flags: JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR);
} catch (JsonException $e) {
    echo 'Invalid JSON received: ' . $e->getMessage();
}