JSON encoding wrongly escaped (Rails 3, Ruby 1.9.2)

Question

In my controller, the following works (prints \"oké\")

puts obj.inspect

But this doesn\'t (renders \"ok\\u00e9\")

render :j         


        

Answer 1

render :json will call .to_json on the object if it's not a string. You can avoid this problem by doing:

render :json => JSON.generate(obj)

This will by pass a string directly and therefore avoid the call to ActiveSupport's to_json.

Another approach would be to override to_json on the object you are serializing, so in that case, you could do something like:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_json(options = {})
    JSON.generate(as_json)
  end
end

And if you use ActiveModelSerializers, you can solve this problem by overriding to_json in your serializer:

# controller
respond_with foo, :serializer => MySerializer

# serializer
attributes :bar, :baz

def to_json(options = {})
  JSON.generate(serializable_hash)
end