title: Is there any special purpose to use json_decode except for decoding JSON?
body: <pre><code>foreach ($results as $v)
  {
      $k = str_replace('profile.', '', $v[0]);
      $data-&gt;profile[$k] = json_decode($v[1], true);
  
      if ($data-&gt;profile[$k] === null)
      {
          $data-&gt;profile[$k] = $v[1];
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  <p>I came across these lines of code, they are in Joomla's 'profile' plugin, in the <code>profile.php</code> file. The <code>$result</code> here is an array of key-value pairs of user profile fields, loaded from this table
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wkfjp.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wkfjp.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
  <p>You can see the values are mostly normal strings or numbers.</p>
  <p>Since it is unlikely that the users will enter JSON strings here, then why use <code>json_decode</code> here?</p>
  <p>Is there any special purpose that I am missing here?</p>