Question

I have an up/down vote mechanism that is updated via ajax. Originally, the code in my view to display the vote count was: <p id='votes'><%= pluralize video.vote_sum, 'Vote' %></p> and the code in my create.js.erb file was: $('selector').html("<p id='votes'><%= escape_javascript pluralize(@video.vote_sum, 'Vote') %></p>");

However, I realized I wanted to have different CSS styling for the number generated from <%= pluralize video.vote_sum, 'Vote' %> than that for the text “Vote” or “Votes”. This required me changing the view code to:

<p id='votes'>
    <%= video.vote_sum %>
    <div class="vote_text">
    <% word = "Vote" %>
    <% if video.vote_sum != 1 %>
      <%= word.pluralize %>
    <% else %>
      <%= word %>
    <% end %>
    </div>
</p>

which works fine. However, when I changed the JS code to this:

$('selector').html("<p id='votes'>
  <%= video.vote_sum %>
    <div class="vote_text">
    <% word = "Vote" %>
    <% if video.vote_sum != 1 %>
      <%= word.pluralize %>
    <% else %>
      <%= word %>
    <% end %>
    </div>
</p>");

the vote display stops updating. Now voting works and all, because when I refresh the page, it displays the correct vote count with the correct styling. However, the ajax has stopped working. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

You have unescaped quotation marks in that JavaScript string. Also, multi-line strings in JavaScript need some special markup — a \ at the end of each non-terminating line.

Fixed:

$('selector').html("<p id='votes'> \
  <%= video.vote_sum %> \
    <div class=\"vote_text\"> \
    <% word = "Vote" %> \
    <% if video.vote_sum != 1 %> \
      <%= word.pluralize %> \
    <% else %> \
      <%= word %> \
    <% end %> \
    </div> \
</p>");