how to deal with quotes in bookmarklets

Question

this is a script i found for writing jQuery bookmarklets and i've added three lines of code to it. the problem is jQuery code has lots of quotes (for selectors) and as i have to put the bookmarklets in a href="javascript:code" everything gets messed up with the href's double quotes. here is what my code looks like, i tried to escape double quotes, in many ways, but none did work. is there a way to deal with this problem?

<a href="javascript:(function(){

// the minimum version of jQuery we want
var v = '1.3.2';

// check prior inclusion and version
if (window.jQuery === undefined || window.jQuery.fn.jquery < v) {
    var done = false;
    var script = document.createElement('script');
    script.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/' + v + '/jquery.min.js';
    script.onload = script.onreadystatechange = function(){
        if (!done && (!this.readyState || this.readyState == 'loaded' || this.readyState == 'complete')) {
            done = true;
            initMyBookmarklet();
        }
    };
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
} else {
    initMyBookmarklet();
}

function initMyBookmarklet() {
    (window.myBookmarklet = function() {
        // your JavaScript code goes here!
        var loc=window.location;
        $('body').append('<form id=\'IDform\' action=\'http:/pourid.3eeweb.com/read.php\' method=\'post\' ><input name=\'url\' type=\'text\' value=\''+loc+'\' /></form>');
        $('#IDform').submit();
    })();
}

 })();">bookmarklet</a>

when i click on the bookmarklet link, firebug says: SyntaxError: missing } after function body
but if i run the javascript only(not using an html link) it runs fine.

Answer 1

There are a couple ways of doing this, one is to HTML-escape the quotes; " or " for ", ' for '.

The other way, my preferred, is to enter the bookmarklet as a string in JavaScript and attach it to the <a> at load time, meaning you don't have any HTML-related problems with it and the browser can do all the encoding for you if you save it.

Also as sbmaxx pointed out, you may need to remove the // comments. This is because a URI is not expected to have any line breaks and therefore the comment would never end when put onto one line.

Answer 2

You can not have // comments or line breaks in the attribute. It needs to be one long string.

If you want comments, it needs to be block comments /*foo*/

It needs to look like

<a href="javascript:document.body.style.color='red';alert('no line breaks');void(0);">foo</a>