Handling Newlines in JSON

When working with JSON data, it's essential to handle newlines correctly to avoid unexpected errors. Here's a detailed explanation of the issue and its solution.

The Problem

When using eval or JSON.parse to parse JSON data containing newlines, you may encounter errors such as "unterminated string literal." This is because newlines (\n and \r) are not recognized within double-quoted strings in JSON.

The Solution

To handle newlines in JSON, you need to escape them using a double backslash (\\) before the newline character. For example:

{
  "count": 1,
  "stack": "sometext\\n\\n"
}

By escaping the newlines, you preserve them in the JSON data and prevent the parser from interpreting them as part of the string.

Example

Here's an updated version of your code using escaped newlines:

var data = '{ "count": 1, "stack": "sometext\\n\\n" }';
var dataObj = eval('(' data ')');

This code will now successfully parse the JSON data without encountering any newline-related errors.