Question

I am performing asynchronous HTTP (Ajax) requests via jQuery with the basic $.ajax(). The code looks like the following:

$("textarea").blur(function(){
   var thisId = $(this).attr("id");
   var thisValue = $(this).val();

   $.ajax({
      type: "POST",
      url: "some.php",
      data: "id=" + thisId + "&value=" + thisValue,
      success: function(){
        alert( "Saved successfully!" );
      }
   });

});

Everything is working properly as usual, until user types inside textarea ampersand (&) character. Than when I debug PHP function, which saves the value, it always have a value until this character.

I believe there has to be a solution to skip ampersand (&) somehow. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Instead of:

data: "id=" + thisId + "&value=" + thisValue

do:

data: { id: thisId, value: thisValue }

This way jquery will take care of properly URL encoding the values. String concatenations are the root of all evil 🙂