While working on my Bike to Work Week web site, it suddenly appeared that Phoogle, the Google maps generator that I use, stopped working. Thankfully, a fix was issued for the "Cannot use string offset as an array" error. In short, the fix is:
add:
if(!trim($data)) return;
as the new first line of the characterData function.
It also appears that you have to replace the instances of [Response] with ['Response']. Fortunately, I fixed that issue myself along the way.