Special characters in JSON are breaking JS

Question

In the ASP MVC controller, I created a ViewBag variable with the list of items to be loaded on my page:

    public ActionResult Items()
    {
        ViewBag.itemList = Repo.GetItems(); // Returns list of Items
        return View("Items");
    }

On the page side, I am parsing this data:

@{
Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializerSettings jsonSettings = new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializerSettings { ContractResolver = new Newtonsoft.Json.Serialization.CamelCasePropertyNamesContractResolver() };
var jsonData = @Html.Raw(Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(Model, Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented, jsonSettings));
var serial = new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer();
var items = serial.Serialize(ViewBag.itemList);
}

In my Knockout load function, I parse the list and remove newline characters which break the JSON.parse() function.

self.load = function () {
var itemsEscaped = '@Html.Raw(items.Replace("'", "\\'"))'.replace("\n", "\\n");
var someItems = JSON.parse(itemsEscaped);
ko.mapping.fromJS(someItems, self.itemMapping, self.someItems);
}

However, other special characters occasionally break the JSON.parse() function. Is there a way to filter these out either on the controller on JS side?

Answer 1

Instead of writing Your JSON directly to the page's HTML, You could pass it as a response to a JavaScript request to the server.

If, however, You would like to write it directly in Your cshtml, take a look at this post: How do I write unencoded Json to my View using Razor? , which shows how to print unencoded JSON to the page with some of the special characters encoded not to cause issues with further parsing.