special characters in embedded javascript

Question

I have some javascript that is embedded in the html file like this

<html>
    <head>
        <script>
            // and the script runs here
        </script>
    </head>
    <body></body>
</html>

And it has a line like this

if((os == 'Mac')&&((br == 'Safari')||(br == 'Chrome')))

Everything goes OK (which means the script works), but the validator is screaming:

... character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data
... This message may appear in several cases:
-You tried to include the "<" character in your page: you should escape it as "<"
-You used an unescaped ampersand "&": this may be valid in some contexts, but it is recommended to use "&", which is always safe.
-Another possibility is that you forgot to close quotes in a previous tag.

It seems ridiculous to replace all & with &amp. How can I get rid of that error?

Daniel Vassallo · Accepted Answer · 2010-02-20 16:18:50Z

5

If you are using XHTML, you need to enclose your inline scripts within a CDATA section:

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
    document.write("&");
// ]]>
</script>

4 Comments

phunehehe Over a year ago

hell yeah thanks. and it seems funny that i have to escape the <![CDATA[ thing

Quentin Over a year ago

That's because you are trying to write something that is both XHTML and close enough to HTML to work when you tell browsers that it is text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml. It is more effort then it is worth IMO so I stick to writing HTML 4.01.

bobince Over a year ago

...I still use XHTML, but stick to external scripts for any significant amount of code. Either way, avoid explicit browser-sniffing.

phunehehe Over a year ago

@bobince: I wouldn't, but the designer made that so I better just leave it alone :)

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