[javascript] JSON: why are forward slashes escaped?

The reason for this "escapes" me.

JSON escapes the forward slash, so a hash {a: "a/b/c"} is serialized as {"a":"a\/b\/c"} instead of {"a":"a/b/c"}.

Why?

This question is related to javascript json

The answer is


PHP escapes forward slashes by default which is probably why this appears so commonly. I'm not sure why, but possibly because embedding the string "</script>" inside a <script> tag is considered unsafe.

This functionality can be disabled by passing in the JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES flag but most developers will not use this since the original result is already valid JSON.


Ugly PHP!

The JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE|JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES must be default, not an (strange) option... How to say it to php-developers?

The default MUST be the most frequent use, and the (current) most widely used standards as UTF8. How many PHP-code fragments in the Github or other place need this exoctic "embedded in HTML" feature?


I asked the same question some time ago and had to answer it myself. Here's what I came up with:

It seems, my first thought [that it comes from its JavaScript roots] was correct.

'\/' === '/' in JavaScript, and JSON is valid JavaScript. However, why are the other ignored escapes (like \z) not allowed in JSON?

The key for this was reading http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/revsol.html, followed by http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.2. The feature of the slash escape allows JSON to be embedded in HTML (as SGML) and XML.


The JSON spec says you CAN escape forward slash, but you don't have to.