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I know that I can create an associative array like this:

var MyAssocArray = {'sky':'blue', 'grass':'green'};

And I am very fond of using this method.

What I would like to do and am having trouble with is this:

I have strings saved like this:

var MyString = "'sky':'blue', 'grass':'green'";

And I want to be able to do this now:

var MyAssocArray = {MyString};

When I try that - I get this error:

invalid object initializer

What am I doing wrong? How can I achieve this?

I found a different solution using PHP and JavaScript. The associative array string is echoed in the JavaScript code:

var Multidimensional_Arr[Multidimensional_Array_Key_Name] = {<?php echo $String_Pulled_From_Database; ?>}; // i.e. 'sky':'blue', 'grass':'green'

// The same can be done for a one-dimensional array
var My_Single_Dime_Arr = {<?php echo $String_Pulled_From_Database; ?>}; // i.e. 'sky':'blue', 'grass':'green'
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3 Answers 3

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4

Use JSON -- it's serialized JavaScript Object Notation and is pretty close to what you're doing.

You'd need to do

var MyAssocArray = JSON.parse(MyString);

Also, JSON uses double quotes, not single quotes; if you use simple objects, you can probably write code to just replace ' with "" in your strings, but it's tricky if the strings contain double-quotes.

If you are using a browser that doesn't implement JSON.parse(), you can either use the implementation on the JSON website (see links at bottom of this page) or if you're using jQuery, there's jQuery.parseJSON().

Warning: Your solution has a security risk, unless you are sure the data in the database has been sanitized:

 var My_Single_Dime_Arr = {<?php echo $String_Pulled_From_Database; ?>}

This is equivalent to a call to eval(); if your database string has any malicious code it can do bad things. This is one reason why JSON was invented -- it's easy to ensure that its contents are valid (and hence safe) before evaluated.

Your overall architecture, as you have presented it to us, is [data in database] -> server-side PHP -> client-side JavaScript. This is a classic example of serialized data. I realize you may have constraints to keep your system running without interruption, but a strict serialization format would make your system more secure.

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Except, can the JSON object really be recommended without a browser support caveat yet?
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If you are sure the data is safe, then you could do:

var MyAssocArray = eval('{' + MyString + '}');
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2 Comments

Also - I found another method:Since the string is being pulled out of a database - I found that I can populate the javascript associative array using PHP
Yeah.. this is not working for me. I tried it and get the error "-- invalid label"
-1

You can't do that.

To achieve what you want, use the split() function to split your string into comma-separated tokens first. Then each token should further be split by the ':' character.

Then push the two tokens obtained by the last split as the key and the value of your associative array.

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that unfortunately won't work if any of the string keys or values has a comma in it.

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