Question

I have a field in my database that has a freetext area, and uses quotes for many things. On my website, that field is shown in a textarea, but I can’t simply put the value between the textarea tags. I need to be able to set it with javascript. I use jQuery to do this, via:

jQuery('#notes').val('{NOTES}');

Since the text can have single or double quotes, I’m unsure how to pass this from mySQL, to PHP, to jQuery so I can put it in my textarea. Has anyone done this before?

Problem solved using:

jQuery('#notes').val(jQuery('#your-hidden-div-id').html());

Answer 1

Use addslashes() from PHP to escape quotes so they can be used inside JavaScript strings:

jQuery('#notes').val('<?php echo addslashes($your_string); ?>');

From your code I assume you may use some sort of template engine so you should add addslashes where you assign {NOTES}.

If you have newlines inside your data you may need to remove them too as this will break JS string (remove with a PCRE regular expression for example). Another way would be to load your data inside a hidden <div> and then:

jQuery('#notes').val(jQuery('#your-hidden-div-id').html());