What is the correct way to work with JSON fields in Postgresql?

Question

PHP

How to work with JSON (and array) fields in PHP?
A query to the database returns me just a string of the form {'bla':'bla'}, which I need to decode / encode every time, which seems wrong to me.
For myself, I wrote an Active record type bike through PDO, which itself deals with decoding / encoding in JSON.
But can you do something better?

Answer 1

What do you mean by "work"? Since 9.3 this is available: www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions-json.html