in reply to Perl, JavaScript and quoting/escaping

Actually I solved it half-way: The problem is less the quoting on the perl side, but what ends up in the html output:

\" becomes " - so inside the href="" we can use the single-quote ' to differentiate things. And if in these single-quotes values need to be presented we double quote \\' so the \' ends up in the html, like example.jsfunction('<a href=\'\'></a>')

But still I am in trouble if I need to add yet another nested layer of quoted values, for example example.jsfunction('<a href=\'\' onclick=\\'alert('test')\\'></a>') - what shoudl I do with the quotes around test? Any ideas?

Update:
I've found out that, at least in Firefox, using entities works: example.jsfunction('<a href=\'\' onclick=\\'alert(&quot;test&quot;)\\'></a>') - but is that portable?

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Re^2: Perl, JavaScript and quoting/escaping
by brycen (Monk) on Sep 23, 2008 at 18:17 UTC
    As the prior poster said: use perl's "bring your own quote characters" to rescue you. Leave ' and " for javascript's feeble mind.
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Re^2: Perl, JavaScript and quoting/escaping
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 23, 2008 at 18:31 UTC
    The entity is &quot;.
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[d/l]
      oops - a simple typo in the post, code was ok.
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Re^2: Perl, JavaScript and quoting/escaping
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 23, 2008 at 19:15 UTC
    Generally, as long as you keep using the same type of quote, you double the \'s for each nested level, so try: 
    example.jsfunction('<a href=\'\' onclick=\\'alert(\\\\'test\\\\')\\'><
+/a>')

    [download]
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[d/l]

      That would only work for if all of JS, HTML and Perl used "\" to escape. HTML doesn't.

      Assuming you had the right number of slashes — you don't — you're code results in the following HTML: 

      <a 
  href=''
  onclick='alert(\'  <- Nice JS!
  test\')'           <- eh?
></a>

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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