There's this [https://github.com/composer/composer/blob/master/src/Composer/Json/JsonFile.php code for reading/writing/validating JSON] which is used by the Composer project.
When working with large JSON data sets, it's helpful to have a viewer like http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ which easily parses and renders the object in a tree fashion. [https://github.com/GerHobbelt/nicejson-php/blob/master/nicejson.php PHP code for formatting JSON] to make it "readable" aka "pretty print" is now built-in, as of PHP 5.4, with <code>json_encode json_decode JSON_PRETTY_PRINT</code>
There are other tools too for working with json