Problem when retrieving text in JSON format containing line breaks with jQuery

Question

I'm having a strange problem when retrieving JSON formatted text. I use jQuery post to send some data (also JSON formatted) to the server (running PHP) which works fine. Then, when I request the same data from the server using jQuery get, the callback method never executes. This only occurs when the data is JSON formatted and the data contains a line break. When I don't use JSON formatting it works fine. What baffles me is that there are no problems with uploading the data.

Uploading code: (works)

$.post("ajax/contents_ajax.php", {
    'title': caption,
    'text': frameText().getContent(),
    'image_id': img
},
//Callback

Download code: (doesn't work with line breaks)

$.get("ajax/contents_ajax.php", { 'get_item': id },
function (data){
    //Never gets executed if data contains line breaks
}
,'json');

The whole problem stems from the fact that the TinyMCE rich text editor seems to insist on inserting line breaks everywhere, even though I enabled the option

remove_linebreaks : true

I do prefer to have line breaks, but not if they break my code. Can anyone tell me what the problem is here, and perhaps how I can encode the linebreaks on the server with PHP?

---

Update

While the suggestions to replace '\n' with '' did not work, it was close to the right solution. This code removed the offending characters:

function parse($text){
    $parsedText = str_replace(chr(10), "", $text);
    return str_replace(chr(13), "", $parsedText);

}

Answer 1

do you get linebreaks like <br /> or newlines like \n? But try to replace them with PHP.

<?php
$string = 'asdfasf<br />asdfasf';
echo str_replace('<br />', '', $strin); // Replace <br /> with '' (nothing)
?>

or check out urlencode

Answer 2

Like Terw but with replacing \n

<?php
 $json = str_replace('\n', '', $json);
?>

Should remove all line breaks, jquery shouldn't fail over
tags, but line breaks should not be in JSON.

Answer 3

Line breaks aren't the issue so much as they need to be properly escaped in JSON. If it's available to you, you can use json_encode which automatically escapes newlines. Failing that, you can use something like Pim Jager's method above, though a proper JSON encoder would be best.

Answer 4

If you would like to keep the line breaks, you might try:

function parse($text) {
    // Damn pesky carriage returns...
    $text = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $text);
    $text = str_replace("\r", "\n", $text);

    // JSON requires new line characters be escaped
    $text = str_replace("\n", "\\n", $text);
    return $text;
}