Philadelphia Reflections

Escaping for PHP Output to JavaScript

To send data to a JavaScript script from PHP, three levels of escaping are required as shown in the snippet below:

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[


// escape for JavaScript
$message   = preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "\\n", addslashes($message));

// escape for XHTML
$message   = preg_replace('%</%i', '<\/', $message);

// send to JavaScript
echo "   var message = \"$message\";\n";


// ]]>
</script>

(my thanks to https://centricle.com/tools/html-entities/ for HTML encoding)

Originally published: Wednesday, March 10, 2010; most-recently modified: Monday, June 04, 2012