Question

Let’s say I have a “test.html” file with some example content:

<table>
 <tr>
  <td>'Test'</td>
  <td>Test "2"</td>
 </tr>
</table>

And I want to use that as a jQuery object. My first instinct would be to attempt:

var $testobject = $("<?php include('./test.html');?>");

But with the line breaks and quotes in test.html, this would fail. I specifically need the test.html file to be a jQuery object so it is hidden on load and is put in different places on the page with various triggered scripts, and I would prefer to use the more static PHP approach than a jQuery load. There must be a simple trick to manage this…

Answer 1

Read the static file using file_get_contents, and deal with special characters using json_encode:

var $testobject = $(<?php echo json_encode(file_get_contents('./test.html'));?>);

For example, if test.html contains:

<a href="/">
  Test
</a>

Then the output will be:

var $testobject = $("<a href=\"\/\">\n  Test\n<\/a>\n");