Search Text with Special Characters

rashid100

Hi,

I am getting some problem to find out text position.
I have textarea what have the following code.

<textarea id="textId">This is Second Line.hello ' and "helo" & this is normal $it is £found '' and ; round , * ! look me
<helo> ? no £4.00 is the price. "'" is the price which I am Looking and ; round , * !
<helo> ? no £4.00 is the price. "'" and """ allow this is " cut
hello ' and "helo" & this is normal $it is £pound '' and ; round , * ! yes sure
<helo> ? no £4.00 is the price. "'" and """ allow this is " john
</textarea>

<input type="button" value="find" onclick="findText()" />

here is the javascript

function findText(){
var textarea=$("#textId").val();
textarea=escape(textarea);
textarea=unescape(textarea);

var searchText="is the price. "'" and """ allow this is " cut
hello ' and "helo" & this is normal $it is £pound";

searchText=escape(searchText);
searchText=unescape(searchText);

var index=textarea.indexOf(searchText);
alert(index);

}

Its always give me a -1 I also use the escape and unescape functions to try to search but result is same. Its could not find the position of text. Can any body help me in this matter.

Bonesnap

I don't understand why you're escaping the text and then immediately unescaping it.

rashid100

because Its break the line in between so thats why I use to escape and unescape functions

Weedpacket

Your JavaScript is broken because you haven't escaped the searchText (as any JavaScript console would tell you). It needs some backslashes.
No, calling escape() afterwards is not going to fix it. Broken code can't fix itself.

bradgrafelman

Using escape() followed by unescape() doesn't make sense; you should end up with what you started with.

As for your Javascript code, the first problem I see is that it contains a syntax error, thus it won't return anything since it'll never get executed. Particularly, this line has unescaped double quotes (since you're using double quotes to delimit the string):

var searchText="is the price. "'" and """ allow this is " cut
hello ' and "helo" & this is normal $it is £pound";

Even if the quotes in that line were properly escaped, I would still expect you to get -1 returned since that text doesn't occur anywhere within the example text you posted.

EDIT: In summary: what Weedpacket said above while I was typing.