I have always used the "evil" eval() function in javascript to process my returning data from an ajax request.

$.ajax({
      type: "POST",
      url: "includes/get-content.php",
      data: { 'input': $("#input").val() },
      succes: function(data){
        data = eval("("+data+")");
        $("#return-data").html(data['content']);
      },
      error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown){
        $("#return-data").html("Error: "+errorThrown);
      }
    });

I have always read that using eval() bad form. I'm not sure if this is still true today as a lot of the argument was for it being slow a few years back.

Anyways, using the example above, how would I change things up to passback json? If I set the dataType parameter to 'json', I still get a html/text string returned. I am probably missing something very newb and obvious.