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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T13:13:04+00:00

I wanted to pass PHP variables to Javascript without triggering any new http request

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I wanted to pass PHP variables to Javascript without triggering any new http request (aka: inserting it directly in markup). But I wanted the content as is (without any sanitization that could change my values, even if they where markup itself). Of course I wanted to keep it safe as well.

The best way i’ve came up so far includes json + base64_encode + data uri schemes:

<script type="text/javascript" src="data:text/javascript;base64,<?php echo base64_encode('var thing = '.json_encode($thing)); ?>"></script>

My question is: will this have any side effect? can I safely use this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I certainly wouldn’t do this. You’re introducing unnecessary compatibility problems (IE). By base64 encoding, you’re bloating the size of your JSON by ~37%.

    <script type="text/javascript">var thing = <?php echo json_encode($thing); ?></script>

    Realistically, the only problem you might run in to is if $thing has a ‘</script>‘ in a string somewhere. (It looks like json_encode() actually escapes all forward slashes /, so this isn’t a problem.) HTML parsers will ignore anything else that might look like markup in a <script> block.

    You do have to watch out for text encoding if your page isn’t UTF-8.

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