How do I escape only single quotes?

Question

I am writing some JavaScript code that uses a string rendered with PHP. How can I escape single quotes (and only single quotes) in my PHP string?

<script type="text/javascript">     $('#myElement').html('say hello to <?php echo $mystringWithSingleQuotes ?>'); </script> 

Answer 1

Quite simply: echo str_replace('\'', '\\\'', $myString); However, I'd suggest use of JSON and json_encode() function as it will be more reliable (quotes new lines for instance):

<?php $data = array('myString' => '...'); ?>  <script>    var phpData = <?php echo json_encode($data) ?>;    alert(phpData.myString); </script> 

Answer 2

If you want to escape characters with a \, you have addcslashes(). For example, if you want to escape only single quotes like the question, you can do:

echo addcslashes($value, "'"); 

And if you want to escape ', ", \, and nul (the byte null), you can use addslashes():

echo addslashes($value);