Rails escape_javascript creates invalid JSON by escaping single quotes

Question

The escape_javascript method in ActionView escapes the apostrophe \' as backslash apostrophe \\\', which gives errors when parsing as JSON.

For

Answer 1

I had some issues similar to this, where I needed to put Javascript commands at the bottom of a Rails template, which put strings into jQuery.data for later retrieval and use.

Whenever I had a single-quote in the string I'd get a JavaScript error on loading the page.

Here is what I did:

-content_for :extra_javascript do
  :javascript
    $('#parent_#{parent.id}').data("jsonized_children", "#{escape_javascript(parent.jsonized_children)}");