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For small amounts of textual info ( Control Messages ) I send what I call bullets (Same syntax as HTML comments ) along with my page during ajax calls. For example

<!--Control Message--><html> all my page here</html>

I then parse the "Bullet" out before rendering the page...even though I don't really have to.

For more data, say 5 variables, I plan on json_encoding it...and sending it with the page as well.

How are others demarcating and extracting the structured data / json strings from html. I could just put it in a "bullet" like below and extract it out...but my guess is there is a more "proper" way to do this.

<!--json string here--><html> all my page here</html>
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

If the data is contextual with the HTML, it would be good to send them as data tags within the HTML?

<html data-value="{name:value}">
    <body>
        <div data-div="{name:value}">
    </body>
</html>
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Personally, I keep my application client view structure separate from the data as this makes writing the data simpler...but a good idea for other styles of programming. – livingston_mechanical Jun 5 '12 at 19:20
+ I send static data and dynamic data separately...as a design choice..so dynamic data is inserted after static data ( which may be cached locally ) – livingston_mechanical Jun 12 '12 at 18:20
In my opinion; the driving factor should be "is the data contextual?" eg: I want to remember a timestamp on when a chart was refreshed... I put it on the div holding the chart. – Nirmal Patel Jun 13 '12 at 6:35
up vote 5 down vote

If you are passing this via AJAX, just embed the HTML in the JSON and parse that JSON as a whole:

{
    "html":"<html>...</html>",
    "other_data":...,
    "some_more_data":...
}

//access it later:
data.html
data.other_data
data.some_more_data

If this data loaded with the page, store the data in a variable instead:

<html>
    <head>
        <script>
            var data = <?= json_encode($data) ?>;
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Yes, but it's no problem for PHP: json_decode(). php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php – Jonathan M Jun 5 '12 at 19:04
@HiroProtagonist json_encode, afaik, does the necessary escaping to prevent syntax self-destruction. However, when parsed, it's up to you on how the parsed data was escaped. – Joseph the Dreamer Jun 5 '12 at 19:14
Ended up using array pushes for each element and then encoding the array. – livingston_mechanical Jun 15 '12 at 21:54

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