Does JavaScript support verbatim strings?

Question

In C# you can use verbatim strings like this:

@"\\server\share\file.txt" 

Is there something similar in JavaScript?

Answer 1

Template strings do support line breaks.

`so you can do this if you want` 

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Template_literals

It does not of course prevent expansion from occurring the in the text, and by extension, code execution but maybe that's a good thing?

Note: I don't think there's a way to take an existing string and run it through expression interpolation. This makes it impossible to inject code this way since the code has to originate in the source. I don't know of an API that can do expression interpolation on-demand.

Note 2: Template strings are a ES2015 / ES6 feature. Support in every browser except (wait for it...) IE! However, Edge does support template strings.

Note 3: Template strings expand escape sequences, if you have a string inside a string that string will expand its escape sequences.

`"A\nB"` 

...will result in:

"A B" 

...which will not work with JSON.parse because there's now a new-line in the string literal. Might be good to know.

Answer 2

No, there isn't support for that in JavaScript. And that workaround seems very problematic as you now lose the ability to have forward slashes.

I've run into this issue myself when I needed to build an alert message or something from an ASP.NET back end, and stick it in a JavaScript alert on the front end. The issue was that developers could enter anything in the Page.Alert() method.

What I did to solve this was as follows:

public void Alert(string message) {     message = message.Replace("\\", "\\\\")         .Replace("\r\n", "\n")         .Replace("\n", "\\n")         .Replace("\t", "\\t")         .Replace("\"", "\\\"");      // and now register my JavaScript with this safe string. }