How do I handle newlines in JSON?

Question

I've generated some JSON and I'm trying to pull it into an object in JavaScript. I keep getting errors. Here's what I have:

var data = '{"count" : 1, "stack" : "sometext\n\n"}'; var dataObj = eval('('+data+')'); 

This gives me an error:

unterminated string literal 

With JSON.parse(data), I see similar error messages: "Unexpected token ↵" in Chrome, and "unterminated string literal" in Firefox and IE.

When I take out the \n after sometext the error goes away in both cases. I can't seem to figure out why the \n makes eval and JSON.parse fail.

Answer 1

This is what you want:

var data = '{"count" : 1, "stack" : "sometext\\n\\n"}'; 

You need to escape the \ in your string (turning it into a double-\), otherwise it will become a newline in the JSON source, not the JSON data.

Answer 2

You will need to have a function which replaces \n to \\n in case data is not a string literal.

function jsonEscape(str)  {     return str.replace(/\n/g, "\\\\n").replace(/\r/g, "\\\\r").replace(/\t/g, "\\\\t"); }  var data = '{"count" : 1, "stack" : "sometext\n\n"}'; var dataObj = JSON.parse(jsonEscape(data)); 

Resulting dataObj will be

Object {count: 1, stack: "sometext\n\n"}