Resolving JSON Parsing Issues in EJS with Node and Express

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Resolving JSON Parsing Issues in EJS with Node and Express: A Simple Guide

The Problem

Imagine you're successfully fetching data from an external API on your server. You then attempt to send this data to your EJS template using JSON.stringify(), and later try to read it in the EJS file using JSON.parse(). However, you encounter an issue where it results in either [Object object] or a string filled with strange characters.

The situation may lead to confusion, as the data does not appear in the expected format. A common error you might see is:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

So how do we resolve this?

Solution Breakdown

Server-Side Code

First, let's check out the server-side code where we send data to the EJS file:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

In this code, you are creating a const info object and then sending it to the EJS template by stringifying it with JSON.stringify(info). This part looks good.

EJS Template Code

Here’s the problematic part in your EJS template:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

In this snippet, "<%= user %>" may include HTML-encoded characters such as ", which would confuse JSON.parse() later on.

The Fix

To solve this issue, you need to alter how you access the user variable in your EJS template.

Change this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

To this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Explanation of the Change

The <%- %> tag is specifically designed to output raw HTML without encoding. By using it, you ensure that the string representation of your JSON data doesn’t get altered with extra HTML entities.

On the other hand, using <%= %> will escape the string, causing special characters to be represented in their HTML-encoded form.

Final Output

After making this change, you can safely parse the data as follows:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

This will allow you to convert the user data back to its JSON form correctly, letting you work with it efficiently as an object.

Conclusion

By following the outlined solution, you should be able to effortlessly transfer your server data into your EJS templates without running into parsing issues.

Happy coding!

If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out!