Question

I’m trying to write a search engine bookmarklet (for Chrome), but I’m having trouble escaping the string.

For example if the search engine bookmarklet is the following:

javascript:alert("%s"); //%s is the search engine query, passed literally by chrome.

Then running it on the following string will give incorrect results:

c:\zebra

c:zebra instead of c:\zebra

If the character after the slash happens to be an actual escape character, then the results will vary depending on the character.

I’ve tried escaping and unescaping the string, I’ve tried reg-ex’ing it, and replacing the slash with a double-slash, but I cannot figure out a way to get this to work because the first time that the raw string enters the script, it is unescaped, and any operation after that will see it incorrectly.

How can this be handled correctly?

Answer 1

So far I can only make this work in chrome:

javascript: var str = (function(){STARTOFSTRING:/*%s*/ENDOFSTRING:;}).toString().match( /STARTOFSTRING:\/\*([\s\S]*)\*\/ENDOFSTRING:/ )[1]; alert(str);

writing c:\zebra will alert c:\zebra.

Firefox doesn’t sustain the comments inside the function body when decompiled, unfortunately.

You also can’t write the sequence */ in the string, but everything else should be passed literally, including quotes " ' etc