Encode a Ruby string to a JSON string

Question

The json gem does not allow for directly encoding strings to their JSON representation. I tentatively ported this PHP code:

$text = json_encode($string); 

to this Ruby:

text = string.inspect 

and it seemed to do the job but for some reason if the string itself contains a literal string (it's actually JS code) with newlines, these newlines \n will stay as-is \n, not be encoded to \\n. I can understand if this is the correct behaviour of #inspect, but...

How does one encode a string value to its JSON representation in Ruby?

Answer 1

This works with the stock 1.9.3+ standard library JSON:

require 'json' JSON.generate('foo', quirks_mode: true) # => "\"foo\"" 

Without quirks_mode: true, you get the ridiculous "JSON::GeneratorError: only generation of JSON objects or arrays allowed".