Passing data in strings

[Rick]

Hi,

I come from 9 years of C/C++ programming and I'm working with a team
of very experienced ASP developers. There are some practices they
follow which I don't agree with, and I'd like to know if there's a
better way of doing this:

1) To populate a dropdown control that's on a page with data coming
from the database, the developers concatenate all the values separated
by a pipe character and pass the string to the JS function, which
splits the string and adds the values to the dropdown control.

I think this is not a best practice b/c:

A) If the data returned from the database results in a string that's
too long, it could exceed the limit of the JS string type and some
items would be missing from the dropdown.

B) If by any chance, the data from the database contain pipe
character, it would result in extra elements inserted in the dropdown
control.

Is there a better way to pass data to JS w/o relying in strings? How
can these practices be improved?

Thank you in advance,

Rick

 

[Martin Honnen]

Is there a better way to pass data to JS w/o relying in strings? How
can these practices be improved?

Use JSON respectively an array literal
["item 1", "item 2", "item 3"]
see <http://www.json.org/>.