jQuery JSON parsing fails for data attribute with double quotes

Question

I am experiencing that HTML encoded values are not correctly fetched where jQuery reads the attribute value—the quotes are decoded—so the JSON parsing fails with this value.

Is this a bug in jQuery or am I not encoding my values correctly?

Here's my HTML encoded JSON string:

[
    {
        "id": "1",
        "organisation_id": "1",
        "badge_id": "49",
        "target": "15",
        "target_type": "actions",
        "target_title": null,
        "target_description": null,
        "start": "2014-01-15",
        "name": "Our goal",
        "description": "Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper. &quot;Nullam&quot; id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et.",
        "created": "2013-08-07 14:26:56"
    },
    {
        "id": "19",
        "organisation_id": "1",
        "badge_id": "49",
        "target": "30000000",
        "target_type": "numeric",
        "target_title": "Revenue contribution",
        "target_description": "Specify how much this action contributes to the revenue goal",
        "start": "2014-01-21",
        "name": "November revenue",
        "description": "Reach revenue of $30,000,000 in November. Let&#039;s do this.",
        "created": "2014-01-21 16:59:25"
    }
]

Note the " in the description property.

And here's a reproduction of the issue: http://jsfiddle.net/J8Xv6/

I think this is an issue which is appearing in newer versions of jQuery. Just updated from 1.7.x to 1.11.0.

Pointy · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-04 15:02:40Z

2

That's invalid JSON. By the time the string makes it to JavaScript, that HTML entity will have become a double-quote character. Double-quote characters in strings must be escaped with a backslash.

The HTML-encoding of the character makes the HTML parser happy, but it results in an attribute value that's got a plain double-quote character in the middle of the JSON value (string constant).

If you put a backslash before the HTML entity, it'll be valid JSON.

edit — in your jsfiddle, you're attempting to fetch the data attribute with the jQuery .data() method. That's fine, but be aware that when jQuery sees stuff that looks like JSON, it will try to parse it for you. Thus when you get back the attribute value it'll already be parsed.

edited Feb 4, 2014 at 15:02

answered Feb 4, 2014 at 14:51

Pointy

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10 Comments

Cerbrus Over a year ago

He knows that, that's the entire problem.

Ronni Egeriis Persson Over a year ago

Thank you for your answer. Do you have a reference for your point?

Pointy Over a year ago

@RonniEgeriis a reference? Well, there's the JSON language spec.

Pointy Over a year ago

@Cerbrus right, and the solution is to make the attribute value not be an invalid JSON expression ...

Ronni Egeriis Persson Over a year ago

@Pointy I know of the spec, but for reference it's always appropriate to point in the direction of the part of the spec where the point you're putting out there is described.

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dhana · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-04 15:04:34Z

Your attribute taking the data this way,

"[{"id":"1","organisation_id":"1","badge_id":"49","target":"15","target_type":"actions","target_title":null,"target_description":null,"start":"2014-01-15","name":"Our goal","description":"Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper. "Nullam" id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et.","created":"2013-08-07 14:26:56"},{"id":"19","organisation_id":"1","badge_id":"49","target":"30000000","target_type":"numeric","target_title":"Revenue contribution","target_description":"Specify how much this action contributes to the revenue goal","start":"2014-01-21","name":"November revenue","description":"Reach revenue of $30,000,000 in November. Let's do this.","created":"2014-01-21 16:59:25"}]"

The error will be raises bold word , double quotes contains inside double quotes.

"Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper. "Nullam" id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et."

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