Common sources of unterminated string literal

sutee picture sutee · Oct 22, 2008 · Viewed 134.9k times · Source

I am trying to debug a JavaScript script that gets read in a Firefox extension and executed. I only can see errors via the Firebug console (my code is invisible to Firebug), and it's reporting a "unterminated string literal."

I checked the line and the lines around it and everything seems fine-parentheses, braces, and quotes are balanced, etc. What are other possible causes that I should be looking for?

Answer

VoY picture VoY · Sep 3, 2009

Most browsers seem to have problems with code like this:

var foo = "</script>";

In Firefox, Opera and IE8 this results in an unterminated string literal error. Can be pretty nasty when serializing html code which includes scripts.