Efficient way to Pass variables from PHP to JavaScript

Question

From time to time I have to pass some variables from PHP to JS script. For now I did it like this:

var js-variable = "<?php echo $php-variable; ?>";

But this is very ugly and I can't hide my JS script in .js file because it has to be parsed by PHP. What is the best solution to handle this?

Answer 1

If you don't want to use PHP to generate your javascript (and don't mind the extra call to your webserver), use AJAX to fetch the data.

If you do want to use PHP, always encode with json_encode before outputting.

<script>
    var myvar = <?php echo json_encode($myVarValue); ?>;
</script>