How to escape string interpolation in Coffeescript

Question

I am trying to use this section of code from jQuery UI's tabs example and convert it to Coffeescript. I've run it through the awesome http://js2coffee.org/ tool.

var tabTitle = $( "#tab_title" ),
    tabContent = $( "#tab_content" ),
    tabTemplate = "<li><a href='#{href}'>#{label}</a> <span class='ui-icon ui-icon-close'>Remove Tab</span></li>",
    tabCounter = 2;

The problem is that tabTemplate variable declaration. Coffeescript is trying to do string interpolation on it, as far as I can tell. I've tried escaping it with a slash, but that just resolves to using a slash in the converted js.

nicolaskruchten · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-22 18:48:53Z

15

Use single-quotes to delimit your string: http://coffeescript.org/#strings

If you want to use single-quotes within your string without manually escaping them you can use 3 single-quotes:

x = '''
my string's ok with single quotes and #{doesn't interpolate}
'''

That said, this is HTML, so double-quotes are actually more common for attributes than single-quotes. Your string could therefore be written as:

tabTemplate = '<li><a href="#{href}">#{label}</a> <span class="ui-icon ui-icon-close">Remove Tab</span></li>'

without any problems.

edited Dec 22, 2011 at 18:48

answered Dec 22, 2011 at 18:33

nicolaskruchten

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7 Comments

Robert Harvey Over a year ago

Yuck. Is that the best we can do? Why don't the double-quotes work?

nicolaskruchten Over a year ago

Because double-quoted strings are what cause the interpolation :) That's the difference between double- and single-quoted strings. See coffeescript.org/#strings

Robert Harvey Over a year ago

Still yuck. Is there any way to escape the entire string, like C# does with @"some\string"?

nicolaskruchten Over a year ago

Yep, that's what the triple-single-quotes do :)

Robert Harvey Over a year ago

Oh. It's not at all clear from the CoffeeScript documentation that triple-single quotes (mind boggles) is the way this works. Anyway, I upvoted your answer based on your second idea.

|

matyr · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-23 04:09:25Z

8

Escaping with backslash does work:

$ coffee -bce '"\#{a}"'
"\#{a}";

$ coffee -bce '"#\{a}"'
"#\{a}";

answered Dec 23, 2011 at 4:09

matyr

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1 Comment

YaTaras Over a year ago

So, we can do: str = " \"#{text wrapped with double quotes}\""

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