I have an app that can generate all sorts of things into the JavaScript strings put on the page. I thought all the escaping were ok, but then I came across a weird problem that I couldn't really find a reason for:

Shouldn't this be legal in an html page:

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert("hello </script>");
</script>

'Legal' meaning that it would produce an alert with hello </script>.

Apparently both moz and chrome, on my box at least, cuts the scripting off after the </script> part of the alert string, producing no alert and a messy output. Has anyone run into this, is this a browser bug?

I have an app that can generate all sorts of things into the JavaScript strings put on the page. I thought all the escaping were ok, but then I came across a weird problem that I couldn't really find a reason for:

Shouldn't this be legal in an html page:

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert("hello </script>");
</script>

'Legal' meaning that it would produce an alert with hello </script>.

Apparently both moz and chrome, on my box at least, cuts the scripting off after the </script> part of the alert string, producing no alert and a messy output. Has anyone run into this, is this a browser bug?

• javascript
• html

Share Follow edited Mar 18, 2014 at 19:15 Uri Agassi 37.4k1616 gold badges8282 silver badges9696 bronze badges asked Mar 18, 2014 at 19:10 jookosjookos 7511 silver badge44 bronze badges 3

• 2 Put a slash alert("hello <\/script>"); – Mr. Alien Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 19:13
• Take a look at this great post where is good explanation stackoverflow./questions/66837/… – Jaroslav Kubacek Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 19:34
• possible duplicate of Is it necessary to "escape" character "<" and ">" for javascript string? – user1596138 Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 19:47

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3 Answers 3

Sorted by: Reset to default 10

The HTML parses it as:

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert("hello 
</script>
");
</script>

With the first occurrence of </script> closing the open <script> element. The mon way of avoiding this issue is by including a \ before the / character in the string:

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert("hello <\/script>");
</script>

This works because the \ escape character will prevent the browser from recognizing <\/script> as an end tag. Normally \ is used as an escape sequence in JavaScript strings, but as there's no \/ sequence, the escape character is ignored and the string evaluates as '</script'>.

This issue can generally be avoided if you follow the good practice of keeping all of your javascript in external .js files. That said, it's mon to see this sort of escaping used for local script fallbacks for unresponsive CDNs.

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert('hello <'+'/script>');
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert('hello <\/script>');
</script>

You should do like

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
    alert('hello </script>');
// ]]>
</script>

To prevent the parsing.