For those that deal in the world of asynchronous clientside programming, you've definitely encoutered JSON - the JavaScript Object Notation. The standard way of taking JSON formatted data and transforming it back into the javascript objects which it describes has been the eval() method. The problem, though, is that this is effectively invoking the JavaScript parser engine for the browser on potentially untrusted code - the javascript parser will basically execute whatever you give it through this method.

A relatively nice article (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb299886.aspx), it describes a script library located off of www.json.org (http://www.json.org/json.js) that provides a much more secure way of parsing JSON formatted data "parseJSON()". It's cousin "toJSONString()" is used to create the JSON strings.

...personally I haven't used this methodology, but it appears promising (at least until there is a much more standardized way of doing it).