tips and tricks for movable type

escaping single quotes with regex
October 13, 2002

There's one rule I've always followed when giving titles to my entries in my journal and blog - I never use titles with single quotes in them.

The reason? I use mouseovers on my blog calendar, and in my journal navigation menu, which show the entry title in the status bar. A title with a single quote in it causes a Javascript error - because a quote is one of those characters that must be escaped with a backslash so it won't be interpreted as part of the code.

So I turned to Brad Choate's Regex plugin to solve the problem.

This is the Regex statement:

See? Even writing the Regex statement is tricky! The first \' tells it to look for just the ' (gotta escape it in Regex too!). The next pair of slashes \\ tells it to replace the quote with a \, and then a ' (with the third escape: \').

So ' becomes \' - which is what I want to make the mouseovers work.

Did you get all that? It sure made my head spin for a moment.

Oh, the final thing is to add it to my entry title tag inside my mouseover statement:

Now, a title like I'm a geeky girlie! becomes I\'m a geeky girlie! - exactly what I need to avoid that nasty Javascript error.

Yay! Now I don't have to think so hard to avoid using single quotes in my entry titles (you didn't realize how complicated my life actually was, did you?)

Update 11.09.02: Of course, if I'd paid better attention to the MT manual, I would have learned this issue was more simply resolved:

DOH!!