Question

For a very simple ajax name lookup, I’m sending an id from the client webpage to the server (Tomcat 5.5, Java 5), looking it up in a database and returning a string, which is assigned to a javascript variable back in the client (and then displayed).

The javascript code that receives the value is pretty standard:

//client code - javascript xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=function() {     if (xmlHttp.readyState==4) {         var result = xmlHttp.responseText;         alert(result);         ...     }     ... } 

To return the string, I originally had this in the server:

//server code - java myString = '...'; out.write(myString.getBytes('UTF-8')); 

Which worked perfectly, if unsafe. Later, I replaced it with:

import org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils; ... myString = '...'; out.write(StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript(myString).getBytes('UTF-8')); 

But while safer, the resulting string can’t be properly displayed if it contains special chars like ‘ñ’.

For instance, using:

escapeJavaScript('años').getBytes('UTF-8'); 

sends:

an\u00F1os 

to the client.

The question: is there a simple way to parse the resulting string in Javascript or is there an alternate escape function I can use in java that would prevent this issue?

Answer 1

The following works in every browser I’ve tried:

javascript:alert('a\u00F1os'); 

Perhaps your string is being escaped twice by mistake.