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Dávid Molnár
27,081 PointsEscaping a character
Hello!
Could someone please explain to me what "escaping a character / value" means for example in HTML or overall?
I've just read this: "By default, React DOM escapes any values embedded in JSX before rendering them." and I don't really know what this means.
Dávid Molnár
27,081 PointsOhh so that's it.. Thank you!
And here I thought it's something advanced lvl stuff since I didn't know what it stands for, what a relief :)
1 Answer
Steven Parker
231,269 PointsThe description Benjamin gave is essentially correct, but the standard escape character is not slash ( / ). The actual escape character is backslash ( \ 
Example:
const description = "The dog said: \"I went to the living room to find my bone\".";
Another way to deal with this situation is to use a different kind of quote to enclose the string, then no "escape" is needed:
const description = 'The dog said: "I went to the living room to find my bone".';
qadyudnbsv
849 PointsExactly, my bad. :)
qadyudnbsv
849 Pointsqadyudnbsv
849 PointsHello Dávid!
An example that might make it more clear to you is this. Imagine creating a string called description with a value of "The dog said: "I went to the living room to find my bone"."
const description = "The dog said: "I went to the living room to find my bone"."As you can see, there are four " characters. JavaScript would be unable to see where the string ends and would give an error.
To fix this issue, we have to add a / before each " that is part of the text, not the code.
const description = "The dog said: /"I went to the living room to find my bone/"."
Now it will now that the first " is the start of the string. The second and third " have the / before it so it knows that that is part of the text. And it will finally end the string with the final ".
I hope you understand it a bit more now. :)