How to escape special characters from a textarea using jQuery post()

Question

I have a form that is composed of a couple of text fields and a textarea for order notes/comments . The problem that I have is that every time I type a special character in the textarea the ajax request stops working. I've tried to escape the special characters using escape, escapeURIComponent, etc, but nothing seems to work. Removing the special characters works, but that doesn't solve my problem. Any suggestions? below is a snippet of the code I have:

$.post(getPost('addComponent'), {
                componentType:$('#componentType').val(),
                productQty:$('#productQty').val(),
                comments:$("#orderNotes").val()
            }, function(data, statusCode) {
        if (statusCode === 'success') {
            updateComponentContainer(data);
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    }, 'json');