jQuery AJAX请求-处理特殊字符以响应PHP页面

Question

I've built a simple jQuery AJAX request that queries a database for a selected template and then returns the email subject and email body and inserts those into the html input fields. This is all working well.

I've just noticed that when the data is inserted into the email body it looks like this:

Dear Sally & John, thank you for your call today . . .

instead of:

Dear Sally & John, thank you for your call today . . .

Also there are placeholders in the email body that the user would typically change manually like this:

Dear <<dear>>, 

these are appearing as:

Dear <<dear>>

I'm using PHP to query the database and return the data as JSON:

$templateDetails[] = array('templateBody' => $updatedTemplateBody);
echo json_encode($templateDetails);

Here's the script that calls the PHP request:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("#templateRef").change(function() {
    var templateRef = $("#templateRef").val();
    var contactID = '<?php  echo $contactID; ?>';
    $.post('getSMSTemplate.php', {
      contactID: contactID,
      templateID: templateRef
    }, function(data) {
      data = JSON.parse(data);
      if (data.error) {
        alert("error");
        $("#messageBody").html('');
        return; // stop executing this function any further
      } else {
        // console.log( data[0].templateBody );
        $("#messageBody").val(data[0].templateBody);
      }

    }).fail(function(xhr) {
      $("#messageBody").html('');
    });
  });
});

Is there some function that I can call to escape these characters? Not sure if this is done in JavaScript or PHP or where to start with this?

Answer 1

This part: $("#messageBody").val(data[0].templateBody); can instead be $("#messageBody").html(data[0].templateBody); .

Answer 2

You can handle it serverside in your php using htmlspecialchars_decode() which you would just call when generating your response before echo ing your JSON back out.

<?php
$str = "<p>this -&gt; &quot;</p>\n";

echo htmlspecialchars_decode($str);

// note that here the quotes aren't converted
echo htmlspecialchars_decode($str, ENT_NOQUOTES);
?>

Output:

<p>this -> "</p>
<p>this -> &quot;</p>

(From PHP Manual) https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars-decode.php

Answer 3

Those "special characters": they are actually HTML encoded text. The issue is not in the code that you posted in your question. Here is a quick proof:

 var data = "<< me & you >>" $("#messageBody").val(data); 

 <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <input type="text" id="messageBody" /> 

As you can see the code displays the "special characters" correctly, so the issue is caused by something else and without knowing more details about your project, I can only think of two possibilities.

1) They are saved like that in the database, so check there to confirm. In this case you can either use htmlspecialchars_decode() to decode your database data before you echo it as JSON, or you can decode it in your jQuery above using $('<div/>').html(data[0].templateBody).text(); . Here is a test:

 var data = "&lt;&lt; me &amp; you &gt;&gt;" data = $('<div/>').html(data).text(); $("#messageBody").val(data); 

 <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <input type="text" id="messageBody" /> 

2) The text gets encoded when you're generating the email. If the text coming from the database un-encoded and your messageBody is displaying it correctly, then you need to inspect the code that is grabbing the text from messageBody to generate the email. Post that code in your question if you need help with it.