Problem serializing a HTML string.

[Jose Monzon]

Hello everybody!

I'm getting an extrange behaviour when serializing strings using this JSON library. The best is to ilustrate it with a example. Let's consider the following JUNIT test:

import net.sf.json.JSONArray;
import net.sf.json.JSONObject;
import net.sf.json.JSONString;
import net.sf.json.JsonConfig;

import org.junit.Test;

public class JsonTest {
    @Test
    public void testHTMLConversion(){
        JSONArray obj = JSONArray.fromObject( new String[]{"<b>as</b>"});
        System.out.println(obj.toString());
    }
}

If I run that test the exit is: "["<b>as<\/b>"]"  Please, notice the slash escape.

If instead of "<b>as</b>" I run the test with: "<b>as< /b>" (notice the space between < and  /, the result is not escaped: ["<b>as< /b>"]

I'm getting problems in my client software because this library is scaping strings that contains "</" and I don't know what to do to prevent it. Why is this happening???

Thanks

[aalmiray]

Jose,

The answer lies in JSONUtils.quote, per the javadoc

/**
* Produce a string in double quotes with backslash sequences in all the
* right places. A backslash will be inserted within </, allowing JSON text
* to be delivered in HTML. In JSON text, a string cannot contain a control
* character or an unescaped quote or backslash.<br>
* <strong>CAUTION:</strong> if <code>string</code> represents a
* javascript function, translation of characters will not take place. This
* will produce a non-conformant JSON text.
*
* @param string A String
* @return A String correctly formatted for insertion in a JSON text.
*/

This is why '</' is escaped but '< /' is not. Given that some users may rely on this to be the default case, we may add configuration flag to JsonConfig to skip escaping '</', how about that?

Cheers,
Andres

[Jose Monzon]

Oh, thanks for the answer. It could be great to add that configuration flag.