SyntaxError: unterminated string literal
Message
SyntaxError: unterminated string literal
Error type
What went wrong?
There is an unterminated String
somewhere. String literals must be enclosed by single ('
) or double ("
) quotes. JavaScript makes no distinction between single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings. Escape sequences work in strings created with either single or double quotes. To fix this error, check if:
- you have opening and closing quotes (single or double) for your string literal,
- you have escaped your string literal correctly,
- your string literal works correctly over multiple lines, if any.
Examples
Multiple lines
You can't split a string across multiple lines like this in JavaScript:
var longString = "This is a very long string which needs to wrap across multiple lines because otherwise my code is unreadable."; // SyntaxError: unterminated string literal
Instead, use the + operator, a backslash, or template literals. The +
operator variant looks like this:
var longString = "This is a very long string which needs " + "to wrap across multiple lines because " + "otherwise my code is unreadable.";
Or you can use the backslash character ("\") at the end of each line to indicate that the string will continue on the next line. Make sure there is no space or any other character after the backslash (except for a line break), or as an indent; otherwise it will not work. That form looks like this:
var longString = "This is a very long string which needs \ to wrap across multiple lines because \ otherwise my code is unreadable.";
Another possibility is to use template literals, which are supported in ECMAScript 2015 environments:
var longString = `This is a very long string which needs to wrap across multiple lines because otherwise my code is unreadable.`;
See also
License
© 2016 Mozilla Contributors
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-us/docs/web/javascript/reference/errors/unterminated_string_literal