Question

I made a very long line of html more readable using the backslash ‘\’ and breaking the url at the ampersand ‘&’ points.

The context is — displaying the Facebook Feed dialog box which takes several parameters, where each parameter is preceded by the ‘&’ character.

Here is the code:

   <a class="fbShareToWall" 
        onClick='window.open("https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=10352809978xxxx \
        &link=http://www.oursite.com \
        &name=Our%20site \
        &caption=For%20business \
        &description=Good%20stuff \
        &redirect_uri=http://www.oursite.com");'>Share on Facebook</a>

The url in the browser’s URL bar looks like this:

       https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=10352809978xxxx      &link=http://www.oursite.com                 
           &name=Our site                &caption=For business         &description=Good stuff
           &redirect_uri=http://www.oursite.com 

There are big gaps between the ‘&’ parameters. Does it work? Sure. The browser must be filling in the big gaps with %20’s for each space. The above ‘gappy’ URL in the browser’s url bar successfully displays the Facebook ‘Feed’ dialog.

I need to make the code legible but take out the big gaps in the URL in the browser’s url bar.

Is there a way to do that and still wrap the very long ‘&’ parameter list onto separate lines with ‘\’ backslash?

Or is there anotherway to wrap a long html tag’s param list onto separate lines with no gaps in the browser URL bar?

Answer 1

Another way to wrap, since you’re in javascript:

onClick='window.open("https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=10352809978xxxx" +
    "&link=http://www.oursite.com" +
    "&name=Our%20site" +
    "&caption=For%20business" +
    "&description=Good%20stuff" +
    "&redirect_uri=http://www.oursite.com");'>Share on Facebook</a>

I’m not sure what those backslashes are for in your code, but if they’re needed then you could probably include them:

onClick='window.open("https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=10352809978xxxx" + \
    "&link=http://www.oursite.com" + \
    "&name=Our%20site" + \
    ...