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ptc-46688181-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 9, 2013
Question

backslashes in the text of a field

  • October 9, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 2409 views

It seems that PTC Integrity does not handle the backslash character as a special character when it appears within the text of a field. This becomes a problem for report recipes that utilizes JavaScript. For example, the following text will be fine for an HTML portion of a recipe, but will not work if brought in to a JS variable:

C:\test\uninstela\seaf\nerasl

If this text was contained in a test annotation, for example, and the text was assigned to a JS variable in the recipe like this:

var test_annotation = "<%testresult Annotation %>";

the resulting script at runtime would be:

var test_annotation = "C:\test\uninstela\seaf\nerasl";

the browser would produce an error because it is expecting a hex value after the \u in this string.

Why doesn't the script generator handle this? It should convert the backslash to &#92; (or something like this) before sending it to the browser:

var test_annotation = "C:&#92;test&#92;uninstela&#92;seaf&#92;nerasl";

Has anyone else run into this problem? If so, have you found a workaround?

    1 reply

    J
    jgorsline1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 25, 2013

    The backslash is an escape character in javascript, so it has to be escaped (ironically, by a backslash). For example, like this:
    "C:\test\folder\subfolder" needs to be "C:\\test\\folder\\subfolder" to not break in javascript.

    A quick little function that I use to automatically escape special characters in javascript is:
    function escapeRegExp(str) {
    return str.replace(/[\-\[\]\/\{\}\(\)\*\+\?\.\\\^\$\|]/g, "\\$&");
    }

    When setting your variable, use this function to properly escape any problem characters. For example:


    var test_annotation = escapeRegExp("<%testresult Annotation %>");

    This is the equivelent of the PHP funciton addslashes()

    P
    ptc-46688181-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    October 28, 2013

    The problem occurs when using an Integrity report recipe where Integrity populates a field in the script that gets assigned to a variable in a javascript segment. I have found no way to be able to fix the slashes in the string before javascript strips out what it thinks are escape sequences. For example, I have a portion of the recipe that looks something like this:

    <script language='JavaScript'>
    <%beginrelationshipsdetail My_relationship_field%>

    myvariable = '<%Relationship fieldnameofinterest%>';

    <%endrelationshipsdetail%>

    </script>

    If the content in the field name of interest contains a backslash, like in a pathname, there will be missing characters in myvariable. The most severe situtation I found was when the character following the backslash is a 'u'. This escape sequence expects to be followed by a hex value format and, if not present, will immediately cause a script error when encountered.

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