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Have you ever needed to unescape a bunch of JSON data at once?

By Andrew Pollack on 07/19/2013 at 02:54 PM EDT

I don't really know if this is "a thing" for anyone else, but I have a whole bunch of JSON data that comes down from a provider as a multi-level object and all the string data is escaped (as it should be). I got tired having to unescape() each string value as I went to use it, so I went looking for something someone else had posted online about doing a "deep unescape" and didn't find it.

Given that I didn't find other people asking about it or getting answers, I have to assume that:

a) There's a parameter somewhere I've missed that does it for you
b) There's a function out there that everyone else knows about but me
c) Nobody else has bothered to do this, and I'm just brilliant.

Option "C" seems particularly unlikely given that I don't do anywhere near as much javascript as many other people, but if this turns out to be useful to anyone, here you go.....



function deepUnescapeJSON(object) {
  /* created by Andrew Pollack 7/19/2013 */
  /* This is a recursive function which will traverse a JSON object */
  /* and unescape all the string properties. I have no idea if it */
  /* would work on other objects, or even all kinds of JSON data */
  /* use it at your own risk.  It seems to work for me. */
  var val ;
  for(var propName in object){
    val = object[propName]; // just in case there's some other type of property
    if(typeof( object[propName] ) == "string") val = unescape(object[propName]);
    if(typeof( object[propName]) == "object") val = deepUnescapeJSON(object[propName]);
    object[propName] = val ;
    }
  return object;
}

** Yes, I know this could be a little more efficient if I used a "switch" statement and a default case option to keep the original value instead of copying the objects around in memory so much. I can't be bothered to do it though. This works, and unless the objects get truly massive, nobody is going to notice the difference --- especially since objects are copied by reference in javascript anyway.

There are  - loading -  comments....

re: Have you ever needed to unescape a bunch of JSON data at once?By Randy Loeb on 10/01/2014 at 01:29 PM EDT
Thanks, just what I needed. Used underscore.js's _.unenescape() but otherwise
worked for me.
re: Have you ever needed to unescape a bunch of JSON data at once?By Alex on 05/11/2018 at 03:19 PM EDT
Thanks! I replaced unescape() with _unescape() from lodash.


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