Problems with json_decode for PHP < 5

Hi, just got the block up and running -- thanks for your help earlier!

Though once the block was working, I discovered that the first day of the month was always getting set to the first day of the week, and realized that it was because the json_decode function was leaving the quotes on the keys in the $calendar->weekdays array.

I tweaked it as follows, and it looks like it's working now (though there may be a more elegant way to do it):

/**
 * json_decode for < PHP 5
 */
if (!function_exists('json_decode')) {
  function json_decode($v) {
    if ($v{0} == '"') {
      $v = drupal_substr($v, 1, -1);
    }
    elseif ($v{0} == '{') {
      $var = explode(",", drupal_substr($v, 1, -1)); # changed from drupal_substr($v, 1, -2), since it was chopping off the final quote
      $v = array();
      foreach ($var as $value) {
        $va = explode(":", $value);
        # added the following condition to remove quotes from the key
        if($va[0]{0} == '"') {
        	$va[0] = drupal_substr($va[0], 1, -1);
        }
        $v[$va[0]] = json_decode($va[1]);
      }
    }
    elseif ($v{0} == '[') {
      $var = explode(",", drupal_substr($v, 1, -2));
      $v = array();
      foreach ($var as $value) {
        $v[] = json_decode($va[0]);
      }
    }
    return $v;
  }
}