Recently active topics in Tumblr tagged with api

Because Tumblr provides its JSON read output as a Javascript variable (complete with a semicolon at the end) it won't work out of the box with the json-php library--and possibly other json libraries. My quick fix was to use str_replace to remove the non array pieces:

$json = new Services_JSON();

$input=file_get_contents('http://thor.tumblr.com/api/read/json', 1000000);
$input=str_replace('var tumblr_api_read = ','',$input);
$input=str_replace(';','',$input);

$value = $json->decode($input);

I don't code much so perhaps there's a better way to go about this. But this hack is working for me just fine.