This is going to sound really ghetto, but I need to print some Javascript to the browser screen so that it can be cut and pasted into another program.

I'm using JSON.stringify() from json2.js, however, its not escaping characters such as quotes and new lines (",\n) which are actually control parts of a JSON object and need to be escaped.

For example, I'd get strings like this that cause problems when importing into the other program:

{
    string_property_01 : "He said "HI"";  // The string terminates after "He said "
}

Are there any libraries that I can use to escape all the characters that I need to escape here?

Thanks!

This is going to sound really ghetto, but I need to print some Javascript to the browser screen so that it can be cut and pasted into another program.

I'm using JSON.stringify() from json2.js, however, its not escaping characters such as quotes and new lines (",\n) which are actually control parts of a JSON object and need to be escaped.

For example, I'd get strings like this that cause problems when importing into the other program:

{
    string_property_01 : "He said "HI"";  // The string terminates after "He said "
}

Are there any libraries that I can use to escape all the characters that I need to escape here?

Thanks!

• javascript
• json
• escaping
• stringify

• How do you print it to the screen? – Dr.Molle Commented Jul 14, 2011 at 1:31

3 Answers 3

Option #2

var g = {
    sampleFunc2 : function (data) {
        var dataAsText = JSON.stringify(data);
        // w jquery
        $('#debugArea').text(dataAsText);
    }
}

// usage... 
g.sampleFunc2({ id: "4", name: "John Smith" });

In markup:

<textarea id='debugArea' rows='10' cols='50'></textarea>

I do the following, its a beautiful hack.

var g = {
    sampleFunc : function (data) {
        var dataAsText = JSON.stringify(data);
        var response = prompt('you can copy and paste this', dataAsText);
    }
}

// usage... 
g.sampleFunc({ id: "4", name: "John Smith" });

JavaScript prompt... gotta love it.

Are you sure this isn't just a browser rendering thing playing tricks on you? A JSON library is going to escape chars properly to give you a valid JSON string. Have you tried paring the output of json2.js to the native JSON.stringify some browsers (like chrome) have?