Disallowed Key Characters ajax response

Question

I am creating a JSON object dynamically and when I send it via an ajax POST I get Disallowed Key Characters as the response. I know that my object is ok because I can create the SAME EXACT object manually and it sends fine. I tried escape() on all of my strings before adding them to the obj but that did not work either.

Am I missing something?

This is my post

$.ajax({
    type: 'POST',

    url: 'http://localhost/test',
    data: obj,
    dataType : 'JSON',
    success: function(){
        console.log('nice');
    }
});

I am using the same obj as in this post

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580260/add-to-json-without-knowing-its-structure

Answer 1

Your page encoding is probably not matching, it means the response can come with some invalid characters, for example:

ÿ¬{"Result":"A"}

You need to ensure that the encoding you are posting matches the encoding on the other side.

Answer 2

I just realized that my Keys have spaces in them

Yeah... the site you are connecting to is probably running CodeIgniter.

CI has some dumb broken input “cleaning” functionality that will deliberately refuse all form parameters with spaces in (or anything other than the alphanumerics and .-/:).

Answer 3

It turns out that this error was caused by CI's input library. On line 215 you will find _clean_input_keys function which uses preg_match() to disallow certain characters in your keys. So when you send JSON around and php recieves it as an array it can throw an error.

To fix this you can either extend the library or edit the CI core.