What's the equivalent but more idiomatic to eval( ) in jQuery?

Question

What's the equivalent to making this call eval('('+responseText+')') in jQuery? I also understand that eval is not that safe, so I'm looking for something safer and more idiomatic in jQuery.

Answer 1

By design jQuery sets out to improve browser implementations. Since there aren't problems with the way different browsers implement eval it is not addressed by jQuery.

Answer 2

Are you actually looking to execute Javascript code (which will always be unsafe to some extent), or are you trying to parse JSON from a string into an object?

If the former, eval() is still going to be your best bet.

If the latter, jQuery will do it for you as part of an AJAX request, or you can use a dedicated JSON plug-in to convert between string and object without the risk of executing arbitrary code.

Answer 3

I don't think it's true that there are no browser differences. I just ran across one today. If you eval a string that calls a method on an object that doesn't exist, Firefox returns undefined and IE6 throws a TypeError.

Answer 4

$.globalEval()?

http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.globalEval/

Documentation says that it behaves quite differently than eval(), but its the closest match if you want to pass your evals via jQuery.