Question

I am trying to copy the string

 $str = '
         this
         is
         my
         string';

to a JavaScript variable like so

 var str1 = '<?php echo $str ?>';

but when I do, I get an error

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

If you are asking yourself why I’m doing this,
I create a <table> with PHP and insert it to the $str variable and want to later use it in a JavaScript function.

Answer 1

You should just use json_encode() from http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php

Example:

var str1 = <?php echo json_encode($str) ?>;

It takes care of converting newlines to \n, escaping any other special characters as necessary, preserve spaces, etc.

Example output for your string:

var str1 = "\n         this\n         is\n         my\n         string";