URL in AJAX POST

Question

I want to post these variables via AJAX:

       <div class="vIn" id="star">
        <div id="inner">
         <span id="1" class="disabled"></span>
         <span id="2" class="disabled"></span>
         <span id="3" class="disabled"></span>
         <span id="4" class="disabled"></span>
         <span id="5" class="disabled"></span>
         <input type="hidden" id="<?php echo $_GET['cID']?>" />
        </div>
      </div>

With this script:

$(document).ready(function(){
 $('#inner span').click(function(){
     $(this).prevAll().andSelf().addClass('enabled');  
     var a = $(this).attr("id");
     var cID = $("#inner input").attr("id");
     $.ajax({
           type: "POST",
           url: "ajax/rating.php",
           data: "value=+a+&cID=+cID+",
           success: function(msg){
             alert(data);
           }
         });
     });});

On the click event, there is no alert. Am I using the right data in $.ajax? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would strongly recommend allowing jQuery to worry about properly encoding the string:

var a = $(this).attr("id");
var cID = $("#inner input").attr("id");
$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: "ajax/rating.php",
    data: {value: a, cID: cID},   // <== change is here
    success: function(msg){
        alert(msg);
    }
});

Note that I'm passing data into $.ajax as an object, not as a string. jQuery will correctly encode it for you. See the docs for details.

If you really, really want to do the encoding yourself, you have to do it explicitly:

data: "value=" + encodeURIComponent(a) + "&cID=" + encodeURIComponent(cID)

Also note that I'm alerting msg, not data, as that's what you've called the response argument to success.