asp.net mvc - Escaping JavaScript string literals in views

Question

Is there a utility function for escaping JavaScript in ASP.NET MVC views? I often need to init a little snippet of JavaScript using some values from the view; for instance I may have something like:

<script type="text/javascript">
var page = new Page({ currentUser: "<%= Model.UserName %>" });
page.init();
</script>

I would expect something like:

<script type="text/javascript">
var page = new Page({ currentUser: "<%= Html.JavaScriptEscape(Model.UserName) %>" });
page.init();
</script>

I could, of course, write the function myself. But since there are already built-in utilities form HTML encoding, and since one of the selling points of ASP.NET MVC is that the <% %> is the default rendering mode, and since what I'm trying to achieve is quite common, it makes me wonder why I cannot find anything like that already built-in. Is there, for instance, an easy and elegant way to serialize an object to JSON in views?

Or am doing something against ASP.NET MVC principles? When I hit a problem like this, it usually makes it think that either I’m doing something wrong since I assume that the framework designers spent some time thinking about real world scenarios.

Answer 1

In .NET 4, The HttpUtility class has a variety of static encoding methods for various contexts, including a JavaScriptStringEncode method for this particular purpose.

It's often simpler to just use JSON deserialization, though.