Adding comments to JSON

There is no comment notation available in JSON. So in order not to break the response with a nasty print_r or echo, we can simply include the output we want as one of the objects/items of the JSON object.

Consider the snippet below:

{"13":
    {
        "monthly_raw":614.20956851334,
        "weekly_raw":141.39219818688,
        "monthly_formatted":"$     614.21",
        "weekly_formatted":"$ 141.39",
        "debug_comment":"select monthly_raw from payment_tables 
         where user_id = 999 and 
       some_other_debug_value = 7 limit 1"}
}

This is quite handy for debugging larger requests.
Obviously these shouldn't make it to production as they add to the amount of data returned by the request.