Question

I’m using Handlebars templates and JSON data is already represented in [Object object], how do I parse this data outside of the Handlebars? For example, I’m trying to populate a JavaScript variable on the page through a handlebars tag, but this doesn’t work.

Any suggestions? Thank you!

EDIT:

To clarify, I’m using ExpressJS w/ Handlebars for templating. In my route, I have this:

var user = {}
user = {'id' : 123, 'name' : 'First Name'}

res.render('index', {user : user});

Then in my index.hbs template, I now have a {{user}} object. I can use {{#each}} to iterate through the object just fine. However, I’m also using Backbonejs and I want to pass this data to a View, such as this:

myView = new myView({
   user : {{user}}
});

The problem is that {{user}} simply shows [Object object] in the source. If I put it in console.log I get an error that says ‘Unexpected Identifier’.

Answer 1

When outputting {{user}}, Handlebars will first retrieve the user‘s .toString() value. For plain Objects, the default result of this is the "[object Object]" you’re seeing.

To get something more useful, you’ll either want to display a specific property of the object:

{{user.id}}
{{user.name}}

Or, you can use/define a helper to format the object differently:

Handlebars.registerHelper('json', function(context) {
    return JSON.stringify(context);
});

myView = new myView({
    user : {{{json user}}} // note triple brackets to disable HTML encoding
});