Need Handlebars.js to render object data instead of "[Object object]"

Question

I'm using Handlebars templates and JSON data is already represented in [Object object], how do I parse this data outside of the Handlebars? For example, I'm trying to populate a JavaScript variable on the page through a handlebars tag, but this doesn't work.

Any suggestions? Thank you!

EDIT:

To clarify, I'm using ExpressJS w/ Handlebars for templating. In my route, I have this:

var user = {} user = {'id' : 123, 'name' : 'First Name'}  res.render('index', {user : user}); 

Then in my index.hbs template, I now have a {{user}} object. I can use {{#each}} to iterate through the object just fine. However, I'm also using Backbonejs and I want to pass this data to a View, such as this:

myView = new myView({user : {{user}});

The problem, is that {{user}} simply shows [Object object] in the source if I put it in console.log I get an error, 'Unexpected Identifier'.

Answer 1

When outputting {{user}}, Handlebars will first retrieve the user's .toString() value. For plain Objects, the default result of this is the "[object Object]" you're seeing.

To get something more useful, you'll either want to display a specific property of the object:

{{user.id}} {{user.name}} 

Or, you can use/define a helper to format the object differently:

Handlebars.registerHelper('json', function(context) {     return JSON.stringify(context); }); 

myView = new myView({     user : {{{json user}}} // note triple brackets to disable HTML encoding });