Removing quotation marks from ajax data

lschneiderman

Everything is working perfectly with my dataTable except that some of the data appears in quote marks:

https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/fish-fry-pittsburgh/

How do I remove the quotation marks please?

$('#results').DataTable({
"processing": true,
searching: true,
"ajax": {
"url": "./php/get_data.php",
"type": "POST",
"dataSrc": ""
},
columns: [
{ title: "Venue", data: "venue" },
{ title: "Address", data: "address" },
{ title: "Neighborhood", data: "neighborhood" },
{ title: "Phone", data: "phone"},
{ title: "Times", data: "times" },
{ title: "Menu", data: "menu" },
{ title: "Notes", data: "notes" }
]
});

kthorngren

One option is to use columns.render with a regex expression to remove the " from the string. Maybe something like this str.replace(/^"|"$/g, '').

Kevin

lschneiderman

@kthorngren How would I stringify the data?

lschneiderman

@kthorngren I got some of it to work:

columns: [
{ title: "Venue", data: "venue", render: function ( data, type, row, meta ) {
return data.replace(/"/g, "");
} },
{ title: "Address", data: "address" },
{ title: "Neighborhood", data: "neighborhood" },
{ title: "Phone", data: "phone"},
{ title: "Times", data: "times", render: function ( data, type, row, meta ) {
return data.replace(/"/g, "");
}

        },
        { title: "Menu", data: "menu" },
        { title: "Notes", data: "notes" }
        ]

But when I try to apply the same code to the menu or notes data, I get the message "data.replace is not a function" in my console log. Any insight into why data.replace works with two types of data, but not others?

kthorngren

Looks like you might have some non-string data:

Maybe a boolean value?

Maybe null instead of blank strings in Notes?

You might need to use if statements to do some type check and handle the data appropriately.

You can use columnDef for the columns.render function since it will be the same for multiple columns. Something like this:

  "columnDefs": [ {
      "targets": [ 0, 2 ],  // List all the columns to apply this function
      "render": function ( data, type, row, meta ) {
         if ( data === null ) {. // Do some type checking
           return "";
         }
         return data.replace(/"/g, "");
        } 
    } ]

The above may have syntax errors as I didn't test it

Kevin

lschneiderman

Thanks, Kevin!