Design list - JSON about csszengarden.com HOT 1 CLOSED

I worked up a quick proof-of-concept for parsing submissions and providing a JSON output. You can see review the commit. I'm not comfortable enough with it to submit a pull request, but thought it might be a step towards a universally available JSON listing of submissions. This was a quick lunch-break hack and my PHP is rusty.

In short, the newly added includes/json_parser.php script rolls through the submissions directories, reads the first line of the CSS file, and attempts to parse the submission details. Currently it is only mimicking masterlist.php but could be extended to provide the path for the CSS file or a link to view it on csszengardne.com.

The parsing is fragile due to inconsistencies within that first line of the CSS. In fact, parsing this information is extremely inelegant at the moment, relying on several preg_match calls.

The result, once you visit the site, is you'll be served a JSON file that looks something like this.
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Other thoughts

In order for this to be effective, the CSS files should be uniform in presenting the submission number, name, author, and website. It might be easier to add a .json file in each folder that contains that information, which would eliminate the need for parsing the CSS at all.

I left the PHP script I wrote in the includes directory, though it would make sense to move that to the top-level, for public consumption.

from csszengarden.com.