Question

Trying to go back to basics here and send a JSON object via ajax to my php. I can’t even get to that part as I get a JSON error. Here is the jquery code:

jQuery(".deletebutton").on("click", function() {

        var employees = [
        { "firstName":"John" , "lastName":"Doe" },
        { "firstName":"Anna" , "lastName":"Smith" },
        { "firstName":"Peter" , "lastName": "Jones" }
        ];

        var dataString = JSON.stringify(employees);

        // Lets put our stringified json into a variable for posting
        var postArray = {json:dataString};

        jQuery.ajax({
            type: 'POST',
            url: 'index.php?option=com_recordings&task=deletevideos&format=raw',
            data: postArray,
            dataType: 'json',
            success: function(data){
                if (data == "blah")
                    alert(data);

            }
        });
});

I get this error (when I check errorThrown): SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character. I checked with jsonlint.com that it is valid JSON. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

dataType refers to the request header, not the response. If you are not sending back valid JSON, jQuery won’t like it. You want to send JSON, but you probably want to get back something else. Just remove dataType and it should work properly, unless there’s an error on the server script.