Develop Reference

JSON.parse get "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token h"

I get the syntax error when I try to pass the following string:
JSON.parse("[{\"Date\": \"4/4/2016 4:15:19 PM\", \"Message\":\"<h3>New
Message</h3> Generated at 4/4/2016 4:15:19 PM.<br/><br/>Heavy Responsive
URL: <a href=\"https://performingarts.withgoogle.com/en_us\" ></a><br/><br/>
<img src=\"https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/06/bd/ac/06bdacc904c12abdce3381ba1404fd7e.jpg\" /> \"} ]");
I know that the error come from the link when I use double quote.
If I use single quote then no issue, but the data is getting from server side, I got no control over what going to pass in so I can only control on my side.
From what I read from the internet so far, I tried the following:
Use JSON.stringify first, then only use JSON.parse. I can parse
with no issue but problem occur when I try to loop the data. Instead
of looping it as JSON, the loop take the data as string and loop
every single text.
Escape every double quote which I'm currently doing, but it's not
working as shown above. But if I replace every double quote to
literal, I'm afraid some of the message that suppose to be double
quote will turn into literal as well, which will result in weird
looking message.
Please advice what other alternative I have to solve this.

You have JSON embedded in a JavaScript string literal.
" and \ are special characters in JSON and are also special characters in a JavaScript string literal.
href=\"https: escapes the " in the JavaScript string literal. It then becomes a " in the JSON. That causes an error.
When you want the " as data in the JSON you must:
Escape the " for JavaScript (as you are doing already)
Escape the " for JSON by adding a \.
Escape the \ for JavaScript
href=\\\"https:

JS - JSON.parse - preserve special characters

I'm running a NodeJS app that gets certain posts from an API.
When trying to JSON.parse with special characters in, the JSON.parse would fail.
Special characters can be just any other language, emojis etc.
Parsing works fine when posts don't have special characters.
I need to preserve all of the text, I can't just ignore those characters since I need to handle every possible language.
I'm getting the following error:
"Unexpected token �"
Example of a text i'm supposed to be able to handle:
"summary": "★リプライは殆ど見てません★ Tokyo-based E-J translator. ここは流れてくるニュースの自分用記録でRT＆メモと他人の言葉の引用、ブログのフィード。ここで意見を述べることはしません。「交流」もしません。関心領域は匦"�アイルランドと英国（他は専門外）※Togetterコメ欄と陰謀論が嫌いです。"
How can I properly parse such a text?
Thanks

You have misdiagnosed your problem, it has nothing to do with that character.
Your code contains an unescaped " immediately before the special character you think is causing the problem. The early " is prematurely terminating the string.
If you insert a backslash to escape the ", your string can be parsed as JSON just fine:
x = '{"summary": "★リプライは殆ど見てません★ Tokyo-based E-J translator. ここは流れてくるニュースの自分用記録でRT＆メモと他人の言葉の引用、ブログのフィード。ここで意見を述べることはしません。「交流」もしません。関心領域は匦\\"�アイルランドと英国（他は専門外）※Togetterコメ欄と陰謀論が嫌いです。"}';
console.log(JSON.parse(x));

You need to pass a string not as an object.
Example
JSON.parse('{"summary" : "a"}');
In your case it should be like this
JSON.parse(
'{"summary" : "★リプライは殆ど見てません★ Tokyo-based E-J translator. ここは流れてくるニュースの自分用記録でRT＆メモと他人の言葉の引用、ブログのフィード。ここで意見を述べることはしません。「交流」もしません。関心領域は匦�アイルランドと英国（他は専門外）※Togetterコメ欄と陰謀論が嫌いです。"}')

JSON.parse failing on valid Json. Have escaped control characters.If

I've escaped control characters and am feeding my validated JSON into JSON.parse and jQuery.parseJSON. Both are giving the same result.
Getting error message "Unexpected token $":
$(function(){
try{
$.parseJSON('"\\\\\"$\\\\\"#,##0"');
} catch (exception) {
alert(exception.message);
}
});
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
Thanks for checking out this issue.

What's happening here is that there are two levels of backslash removal being applied to the string. The first is done by the browser's JavaScript engine when it parses the single-quoted string. In JavaScript, single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings are exactly equivalent (other than the fact that single-quotes must be backslash-escaped in single-quoted strings and double-quotes must be backslash-escaped in double-quoted strings); both types of strings take backslash escape codes such as \\ for backslash, \' for single-quote (redundant but accepted in double-quoted strings), and \" for double-quote (redundant but accepted in single-quoted strings).
In your JavaScript single-quoted string literal you have several instances of this kind of thing, which are meant to be valid JSON double-quoted strings:
"\\\\\"$\\\\\"#,##0"
After the browser has parsed it, the string contains exactly the following characters (including the outer double-quotes, which are unremoved because they are contained in a single-quoted string):
"\\"$\\"#,##0"
You can see that each consecutive pair of backslashes became a single literal backslash, and the two cases of an odd backslash followed by a double-quote each became a literal double-quote.
That is the text that is being passed as an argument to $.parseJSON, which is when the second level of backslash removal occurs. During JSON parsing of the above text, the leading double-quote signifies the start of a JSON string literal, then the pair of backslashes is interpreted as a single literal backslash, and then the immediately following double-quote terminates the JSON string literal. The stuff that follows (dollar, backslash, backslash, etc.) is invalid JSON syntax.
The problem is that you've embedded valid JSON in a JavaScript single-quoted string literal, which, although it happens to be valid JavaScript syntax by fluke (it wouldn't have been if the JSON contained single-quotes, or if you'd tried using double-quotes to delimit the JavaScript string literal), no longer contains valid JSON after being parsed by the browser's JavaScript engine.
To solve the problem, you have to either manually escape the JSON content to be properly embedded in a JavaScript string literal, or load it independently of the JavaScript source, e.g. from a flat file.
Here's a demonstration of how to solve the problem using your latest example code:
$(function() {
try {
alert($.parseJSON('{"key":"\\\\\\\\\\"$\\\\\\\\\\"#,##0"}').key); // works
alert($.parseJSON('{"key":"\\\\\"$\\\\\"#,##0"}').key); // doesn't work
} catch (exception) {
alert(exception.message);
}
});
http://jsfiddle.net/814uw638/2/
Since JavaScript has a simple escaping scheme (e.g. see http://blogs.learnnowonline.com/2012/07/19/escape-sequences-in-string-literals-using-javascript/), it's actually pretty easy to solve this problem in the general case. You just have to decide in advance how you're going to quote the string in JavaScript (single-quotes are a good idea, because strings in JSON are always double-quoted), and then when you prepare the JavaScript source, just add a backslash before every single-quote and every backslash in the embedded JSON. That should guarantee it will be perfectly valid, regardless of the exact JSON content (provided, of course, that it is valid JSON to begin with).

In your original problem, why do you need to do JSONparse in the first place? You could have easily gotten the object you wanted by just doing
var o = { blah }
by manually removing the single quotes you have around the curly braces rather than doing
$.JSONparse('{blah}')
Is there any reason for evaluating the string first (ie var s = '{blah}' and then doing $.JSONparse(s)) which is what your original code was doing? There shouldn't be a case where this is necessary. Since you mentioned somewhere that the string was produced by JSON.stringify, there shouldn't be a scenario where you need to explicitly store it into a variable (ie copy and paste it and put quotes around it).
The main problem here is the string produced by JSON.stringify, which is properly escaped, has been 'evaluated' once when you manually put braces around it. So the key is to make sure the string doesn't get 'evaluated'
Even if you wanted to pass the stringified variable to database or anything, there is no need to explicitly use quotes. One could do
var s = JSON.stringify(obj);
db.save("myobj",s)
var newObj = JSON.parse(db.load("myobj"))
The string is stored verbatim without getting evaluated, so that when you retrieve it, you would have the exact same string.

Browser JSON vs node JSON

I'm attempting to serialize a string that contains escaped strings into JSON. I would have imagined that JSON.stringify() would correctly re-escape those strings and allow me to JSON.parse it. In a simple case, for example:
JSON.parse(JSON.stringify("\\"))
The output from node is "\". The output from the browser is "\" - it seems the browser (chrome in my case) is not correctly converting the double backslash \\ into \\\\.
Why is that?

When you write code, you have to write "\\" (because backslash self is used as escaping), which is a string contains only one backslash ("\\".length is 1).
But when displayed in console or browser, it will displayed as "\".

Escaping javascript variable double quotes

I'm using Ajax calls to get some variables data from the DB.
some of my data stored on the database contains double quotes (").
when I'm trying to display the variable :
value="'+ucontent+'"
the string gets cut in the middle (of course)
I have tried using escape() but im getting a non readable result - something with %4%2 etc...
how can i escape the double quotes in the variable and still keep a readable string...
BTW - I'm using UTF8 characters.

decodeURIComponent()
might be helpful
what escape actually does is replace some characters with a hexadecimal escape sequence.
That is the reason why you are getting unreadable string like %4%2.

Depends on what language in server side you are using.
If it is php, then use json_encode to encode the response string.
If it is ruby(rails), then use escape_javascript to escape the response string.

You can just use \" if you don't use an encoder. See this.