How do I handle newlines in JSON?

javascript json newline
polarbear picture polarbear · Sep 3, 2008 · Viewed 511.9k times · Source

I've generated some JSON and I'm trying to pull it into an object in JavaScript. I keep getting errors. Here's what I have:

var data = '{"count" : 1, "stack" : "sometext\n\n"}';
var dataObj = eval('('+data+')');

This gives me an error: 

unterminated string literal

With JSON.parse(data), I see similar error messages: "Unexpected token ↵" in Chrome, and "unterminated string literal" in Firefox and IE.

When I take out the \n after sometext the error goes away in both cases. I can't seem to figure out why the \n makes eval and JSON.parse fail.

Answer

BlaM picture BlaM · Sep 3, 2008

I guess this is what you want:

var data = '{"count" : 1, "stack" : "sometext\\n\\n"}';

(You need to escape the "\" in your string (turning it into a double-"\"), otherwise it will become a newline in the JSON source, not the JSON data.)

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