Develop Reference

Error parsing JSON with escaped quotes inside single quotes

I have a variable var jsonData = '{"Key":"query","Value":"dept=\"Human Resources*\"","ValueType":"Edm.String"}';
I'm trying to parse the variable with JSON.parse(jsonData), however, I'm getting an error "Unexpected token H in JSON at position 30." I can't change how the variable is returned, so here's what I think I understand about the problem:
The JSON.parse(jsonData) errors out because it's not recognizing the escaped double quotes as escaped since it is fully enclosed in single quotes
jsonData.replace(/\\"/g, "\\\\"") or other combinations that I've tried aren't finding the \" because javascript treats \" as just "
QUESTION How can I parse this properly, by either replacing the escaped quotes with something JSON.parse() can handle or using something else to parse this correctly? I'd like to stick with JSON.parse() on account of it's simplicity, but open to other options.
EDIT: Unfortunately I can't change the variable at this stage, it is just a small example of a larger JSON response. This is a temporary solution until the app is granted access to the API, but I needed the solution in the interim until that happens (IT dept can be slow). What I'm doing now its getting a large JSON response back by hitting the API address directly and the browser uses the cookies from the user OAuth for authentication. I then copy and paste the JSON response into my application so I can work with the data. The response is riddled with the escaped quotes and manually editing the text would be laborious and I'm trying to avoid copying into text processor before copying into the variable.

You should escape the backslash character in your code by prefixing it with another backslash. So the code becomes:
var jsonData = '{"Key":"query","Value":"dept=\\"Human Resources*\\"","ValueType":"Edm.String"}';
The first backslash is so that JS puts the second backslash in the string, which must be in the string so that the json parser knows that it should ignore the quote character.

The unfortunate thing about this situation is that in the JavaScript code there is no difference between
var jsonData = '{"Key":"query","Value":"dept=\"Human Resources*\"","ValueType":"Edm.String"}'
and
var jsonData = '{"Key":"query","Value":"dept="Human Resources*"","ValueType":"Edm.String"}'.
You could hardcode information you have about the JSON into the way you program it. For example, you could replace occurences of the regex ([\[\{,:]\s+)\" by $1\" but this would fail to work if the string Human Resources* could also end in a :, { or ,. This would also potentially cause security issues.
In my opinion, the best way to solve your problem would be to put the json response in a json file somewhere so that it can be read into a string by the javascript code that needs to use it.

I think you can also dispense with the initial String to represent the JSON object:
Use a standard JSON object.
Make whatever changes you need on that object.
Call JSON.stringify(YOUR_OBJECT) for a String representation.
Then, JSON.parse(…) when you need an object again.
That should be able to satisfy your initial request, question, keep your current (escaped) String values, and give you some room to make a lot of changes.
To escape your current String value:
obj["Value"] = 'dept=\"Human Resources*\"'
Alternatively, you can nest attributes:
obj["Value"]["dept"] = "Human Resources*"
Which may be helpful for other reasons.
I've found that I've rarely worked with JSON in an enterprise or production environment where the above sequence wasn't used (I've never used a purely string representation in a production environment) simply due to the ease of modifying attributes, generating dynamic data/modifying the JSON object, and actually using the JSON programmatically.
Using string representations for what are really attribute key-value pairings often causes headaches later on (for example, when you want to read the Human Resources* value programmatically and use it).
I hope you find that approach helpful!

Passing special characters in a url for drill through SSRS

I am trying to pass the parameter value to a drill through report in SSSRS. The value i have to pass is a field that i get using MDX and the value is like [F&B]. While i tried to pass the value as usual, it showed an error. Then i could realize that the issue is with the special character "&". I tried replacing it with %26 also. It worked fine when i directly pasted the url in the browser but failed when i implemented it in the Action Expresion.
Thanks for the help in advance.

Make sure you URLEncode your parameters.
I believe the ASP function is Server.URLEncode
[ and ] will probably get encoded as well.

How can I use the '&' as a search criteria in a url

This is my first post, so don't mind me if it is a repeat, but I couldn't find an answer.
I'm working with javascript/html/abl/css, etc and I have to be able to use the & as a search criteria.
I need a way to get something like http://this.com/mode=results&action=search&result='&'& to work.
The problem that I'm having is that the url keeps interpretting it like a seperator, and the page breaks. I've tried to convert it to a %26 or a & to try and keep it in the search, but then it won't find my search. I looked at google's url when search for & and it's replace by %26. Any opinions?
Thanks, Sheldon.

Use the javascript encodeURIComponent() Function.
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_encodeuricomponent.asp

You will need to escape & in the URL in order for the character to not be treated as a separator. And as you stated, the correct encoding is %26. Perhaps you need to make an additional change on the server to ensure the encoded char is processed correctly?

How does position of parameters in a Query string affect the page?

I have an application with most of the code written in javascript. I am encountering a strange problem. I have a query string and my app reads it to perform various actions. Yesterday I changed the ordering of the query string parameters and the application stopped working. If I put the original order back then it starts working. What could be the reason? I thought that the effect of ordering of parameters should not matter. But, apparently it does matter for some reason. I am still trying to dig out what can be the issue but wanted to know if any one here has encountered a similar problem?
Thanks.

A properly written application will find a given query parameter in any order and will not be order sensitive. It is possible though to have poorly written parsing code that would only find a given parameter at the beginning, at the end, or only if after some other parameter. Without seeing the code that parses the query parameters, we can't really say what problem it has, but it is possible to have poorly written code that is position-sensitive.
If you post the code that parses the query parameters and the query string that works and the one that doesn't, we could advise more specifically. You should also check to make sure that your query parameters don't have any characters in them that are supposed to be encoded that could be throwing things off.

I have seen that kind of problem when the developer used the query string, as is, as a key to a cached object. When the query string changed, the key was not the same and the cache mechanism was failing (due to another bug).

It should not be a problem. Something else causes the error. Or you have some dependencies on the location variable that contains the URL.

How to encode periods for URLs in Javascript?

The SO post below is comprehensive, but all three methods described fail to encode for periods.
Post: Encode URL in JavaScript?
For instance, if I run the three methods (i.e., escape, encodeURI, encodeURIComponent), none of them encode periods.
So "food.store" comes out as "food.store," which breaks the URL. It breaks the URL because the Rails app cannot recognize the URL as valid and displays the 404 error page. Perhaps it's a configuration mistake in the Rails routes file?
What's the best way to encode periods with Javascript for URLs?

I know this is an old thread, but I didn't see anywhere here any examples of URLs that were causing the original problem. I encountered a similar problem myself a couple of days ago with a Java application. In my case, the string with the period was at the end of the path element of the URL eg.
http://myserver.com/app/servlet/test.string
In this case, the Spring library I'm using was only passing me the 'test' part of that string to the relevant annotated method parameter of my controller class, presumably because it was treating the '.string' as a file extension and stripping it away. Perhaps this is the same underlying issue with the original problem above?
Anyway, I was able to workaround this simply by adding a trailing slash to the URL. Just throwing this out there in case it is useful to anybody else.
John

Periods shouldn't break the url, but I don't know how you are using the period, so I can't really say. None of the functions I know of encode the '.' for a url, meaning you will have to use your own function to encode the '.' .
You could base64 encode the data, but I don't believe there is a native way to do that in js. You could also replace all periods with their ASCII equivalent (%2E) on both the client and server side.
Basically, it's not generally necessary to encode '.', so if you need to do it, you'll need to come up with your own solution. You may want to also do further testing to be sure the '.' will actually break the url.
hth

I had this same problem where my .htaccess was breaking input values with .
Since I did not want to change what the .htaccess was doing I used this to fix it:
var val="foo.bar";
var safevalue=encodeURIComponent(val).replace(/\./g, '%2E');
this does all the standard encoding then replaces . with there ascii equivalent %2E. PHP automatically converts back to . in the $_REQUEST value but the .htaccess doesn't see it as a period so things are all good.

Periods do not have to be encoded in URLs. Here is the RFC to look at.
If a period is "breaking" something, it may be that your server is making its own interpretation of the URL, which is a fine thing to do of course but it means that you have to come up with some encoding scheme of your own when your own metacharacters need escaping.

I had the same question and maybe my solution can help someone else in the future.
In my case the url was generated using javascript. Periods are used to separate values in the url (sling selectors), so the selectors themselves weren't allowed to have periods.
My solution was to replace all periods with the html entity as is Figure 1:
Figure 1: Solution
var urlPart = 'foo.bar';
var safeUrlPart = encodeURIComponent(urlPart.replace(/\./g, '.'));
console.log(safeUrlPart); // foo%26%2346%3Bbar
console.log(decodeURIComponent(safeUrlPart)); // foo.bar

I had problems with .s in rest api urls. It is the fact that they are interpreted as extensions which in it's own way makes sense. Escaping doesn't help because they are unescaped before the call (as already noted). Adding a trailing / didn't help either. I got around this by passing the value as a named argument instead. e.g. api/Id/Text.string to api/Id?arg=Text.string. You'll need to modify the routing on the controller but the handler itself can stay the same.

If its possible using a .htaccess file would make it really cool and easy. Just add a \ before the period. Something like:\.

It is a rails problem, see Rails REST routing: dots in the resource item ID for an explanation (and Rails routing guide, Sec. 3.2)

You shouldn't be using encodeURI() or encodeURIComponent() anyway.
console.log(encodeURIComponent('%^&*'));
Input: %^&*. Output: %25%5E%26*. So, to be clear, this doesn't convert *. Hopefully you know this before you run rm * after "cleansing" that input server-side!
Luckily, MDN gave us a work-around to fix this glaring problem, fixedEncodeURI() and fixedEncodeURIComponent(), which is based on this regex: [!'()*]. (Source: MDN Web Docs: encodeURIComponent().) Just rewrite it to add in a period and you'll be fine:
function fixedEncodeURIComponent(str) {
return encodeURIComponent(str).replace(/[\.!'()*]/g, function(c) {
return '%' + c.charCodeAt(0).toString(16);
});
}
console.log(fixedEncodeURIComponent('hello.'));