317768 - JavaScript backslash escaping error

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Ivar Snaaijer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

The page has the following code (at the end of the document)

if (use_a == 1){document.write("<script language=\"javascript\" src=\"tempfiles/mapcoords_a.js\"></script>");}
else{document.write("<script language=\"javascript\" src=\"tempfiles/mapcoords_b.js\"></script>");	}

The Java console gives me this message 

Error: unterminated string literal
Source File: http://bpfile2.asp4all.nl/indexauto.html
Line: 214, Column: 31
Source Code:
if (use_a == 1){document.write("<script language=\"javascript\" src=\"tempfiles/mapcoords_a.js\">


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open page

Actual Results:  
no red lines show up (some code is printed at the top of the page)

Expected Results:  
red lines (indicating traffic jams) should be shown on the page

One of the other browsers (he who should not be named) makes it look easy.

when i drag the page through the validator it gets almost crazy. is it an evangelism bug ?

Comment 1

[Richard Brodie]

Yes, it's a site problem: one shouldn't have a literal </script> within a script.
Quoting it doesn't make any difference to the HTML parser (see bug 32618)

 The usual thing to do within JS code is to write it as <\/script>, which they have done elsewhere on the site.

Comment 2

[Ivar Snaaijer]

I send them an email and made a working page, I only had to add the \ in <\/script> as you said.

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I don't speak or read Dutch, but I'm pretty sure this site is dead, and therefore FIXED.