Escaping JavaScript String

Question

I am using $.ajax() to make a web service call from my client script. The data for this call is defined as follows.

data: "{ term: '" + request.term + "' }",

The problem is that request.term contains what the user typed into a text box. So what happens if it contains quotes or other unexpected characters?

Is there a function to escape any such characters so that the resulting JSON string will be correctly formed?

Quentin · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-28 14:20:35Z

2

Don't build JSON by hand.

Don't manually escape data for JSON.

Use JSON.stringify.

var obj = {
    term: request.term
};
var json = JSON.stringify(obj);
// etc
data: json,

spec
mdn

answered Aug 28, 2014 at 14:20

Quentin

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6 Comments

Jonathan Wood Over a year ago

Even if I follow this advice, my actual code contains additional text that must be combined with the text entered by the user. How can I form such a string without invalid characters?

Quentin Over a year ago

@JonathanWood — That's what JSON.stringify does.

Quentin Over a year ago

@JonathanWood — If, by "multiple data items", you mean "objects with more than one property" then it works in the same way as an object with a single property. A JavaScript data structure goes in and a string of JSON comes out.

Jonathan Wood Over a year ago

Thanks, but I'm still missing something. If my string would've been term: ' + request.term + ', arg2: ' + blah2 + ', arg3: ' + blah3. How do I safely pass that to JSON.stringify() or anything else.

Quentin Over a year ago

You don't build the JSON string by hand.

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