Question

To keep my code clean I am defaulting each of the elements of a form with jQuery.

i.e My form contains elements like this..

<input name="mobile" id="mobile" type="text" />

In my separate javascript file, I read data from MySQL, then use jQuery to set it, after the form is loaded..

$('#mobile').val('07845 887766');

this value is read from MySQL and I generate the code like this, in PHP..

echo "\n $('#mobile').val('".$user['mobile']."');";

This works fine, but the problem lies when there is a textarea field..

<textarea name="notes" id="notes" ></textarea>

echo "\n $('#notes').html('TEST');";

This works fine, but when I replace it with the data from a database, which can contain newlines, I get a javascript error.

echo "\n $('#notes').html('".$user['notes']."');";

This could produce this code (Actual values…)

$("#notes").html("INSERT INTO action    (
                    inputdate,
                )
                VALUES ()");

Which gives an error. “unterminated string literal”

Answer 1

unterminated string literal

You’re getting this message because in Javascript you can’t span literal strings across multiple lines.

What you need to do is replace newlines in $user['notes'] with the characters \r\n so all the string is on one line then the <textarea> input will correctly show each item on a new line.

Let’s use json_encode to help us also escape any nasty characters which Javascript won’t like.

// This will convert to be Javascript friendly. 
// Output string will be enclosed in quotes " "
$notes_str = json_encode($user['notes']);
echo "\n $('#notes').html(" . $notes_str . ");";