Question

I asked another question poorly so i’ll ask something else.

According to http://www.c-point.com/javascript_tutorial/special_characters.htm there are a few escape characters such as \n and \b. However / is not one of them. What happens in this case? (\/) is the \ ignored?

I have a string in javascript 'http:\/\/www.site.com\/user'. Not that this is a literal with ' so with " it would look like \\/ anyways i would like to escape this string thus the question on what happens on non ‘special’ escape characters.

And another question is if i had name:\t me (or "name:\\t me" is there a function to escape it so there is a tab? i am using C# and these strings come from a JSON file

Answer 1

According to Mozilla:

For characters not listed […] a preceding backslash is ignored, but this usage is deprecated and
should be avoided.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide/Values%2c_Variables%2c_and_Literals#section_19

The \/ sequence is not listed but there’re at least two common usages:

<1> It’s required to escape literal slashes in regular expressions that use the /foo/ syntax:

var re = /^http:\/\//;

<2> It’s required to avoid invalid HTML when you embed JavaScript code inside HTML:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
alert('</p>')
//--></script>

… triggers: end tag for element “P” which is not open

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
alert('<\/p>')
//--></script>

… doesn’t.