How do I replace a double-quote with an escape-char double-quote in a string using JavaScript

Question

Say I have a string variable  var str  as follows-  Dude  he totally said that  quot You Rock  quot   Now If I m to make it look like as follows-  Dude  he totally said that  quot You Rock  quot   How do I accomplish this using the JavaScript replace   function  str replace  quot   quot  quot   quot    quot  quot    is not working so well  It gives unterminated string literal error  Now  if the above sentence were to be stored in a SQL database  say in MySQL as a LONGTEXT  or any other VARCHAR-ish  datatype  what else string optimizations I need to perform  Quotes and commas are not very friendly with query strings  I d appreciate a few suggestions on that matter as well

User · Answer

The other answers will work for most strings, but you can end up unescaping an already escaped double quote, which is probably not what you want.

To work correctly, you are going to need to escape all backslashes and then escape all double quotes, like this:

var test_str = '"first \\" middle \\" last "';
var result = test_str.replace(/\\/g, '\\\\').replace(/\"/g, '\\"');

depending on how you need to use the string, and the other escaped charaters involved, this may still have some issues, but I think it will probably work in most cases.

User · Answer

var str    Dude  he totally said that  You Rock     var var1   str replace     g          alert var1

User · Answer

You need to use a global regular expression for this  Try it this way  str replace   quot  g      quot      Check out regex syntax and options for the replace function in Using Regular Expressions with JavaScript

User · Answer

Try this  str replace  quot   quot  quot    quot     quot  quot        Escape backslashes and embedded double-quotes   Or  use single-quotes to quote your search and replace strings  str replace   quot        quot           Still need to escape the backslash   As pointed out by helmus  if the first parameter passed to  replace   is a string it will only replace the first occurrence  To replace globally  you have to pass a regex with the g  global  flag  str replace   quot  g   quot     quot  quot       or str replace   quot  g      quot      But why are you even doing this in JavaScript  It s OK to use these escape characters if you have a string literal like  var str    quot Dude  he totally said that   quot You Rock   quot  quot    But this is necessary only in a string literal  That is  if your JavaScript variable is set to a value that a user typed in a form field you don t need to this escaping  Regarding your question about storing such a string in an SQL database  again you only need to escape the characters if you re embedding a string literal in your SQL statement - and remember that the escape characters that apply in SQL aren t  usually  the same as for JavaScript  You d do any SQL-related escaping server-side

[javascript] How do I replace a double-quote with an escape-char double-quote in a string using JavaScript?

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