Question

Often times, when I use struts 2 tags, the loading of a page will be incomplete apparently because of single quote or double quote characters from the struts 2 tag interfering with such characters from javascript.

One example I am very eager to get working is as follows:

 var me = '<s:a href=\'http://www.google.com\'>Google Link</s:a>';
 $('#appnSelect').html(me);

So what I am concerned about is when single and double quotes are inside that me string on the right side of line 1. Ultimately, I need to get <s:select> to work, but this problem seems to creep in with a number of tags like the above example. Replace the <s:a> tag with an <a> tag, and voila, it works. However, when the <s:a> tag gets expanded, the page will incompletely load.

Is there an easy solution somewhere I am missing? One thing I did try was with the theme attribute setting theme=”simple” because sometimes that helps me when the output gets rendered incorrectly. That did not work in this case.

Answer 1

Generating HTML from tags like that in the middle of a JavaScript string constant is always going to be an ugly business. In addition to quote characters, you’re also likely to get newlines. Strictly speaking you don’t know what you’re going to get, and you can’t control it.

One thing that comes to mind is that you could drop the tags into dummy <script> blocks marked as a non-JavaScript type:

<script id='anAnchor' type='text/html'>
  <s:a href='http://www.google.com'>Google Link</s:a>
</script>

The browser won’t try to execute that. You can then do this in your JavaScript code:

$('#appnSelect').html($('#anAnchor').html());