Timezone in date string rendered as \u... in ld+json

support
1

Template code:

{{$date := "2006-11-15T15:47:00"}}
{{ $dateFormat := "2023-01-02T15:04:05-0700"}}
{{ $date = time.AsTime $date}}
{{ warnf "%s" ($date.Format $dateFormat)}}
<script type="application/ld+json">
    "date": "{{$date.Format $dateFormat}}"
</script>

warnf says
WARN 2023-11-15T15:47:00+0000

OTOH, the generated code contains an invalid date string:

<script type="application/ld+json">
  {
    "date": "2023-11-15T15:47:00\u002b0000"
…

Piping the formatted $date through safeHTML, safeJS or safeJSStr doesn’t give me anything else here. If I use Z instead of -07:00, I get a Z as time zone in the ld+json stuff – but that’s not what I really want.

Is that expected behavior? If so, is there a way to have the formatted date appear in side the script element as it does outside?

2

Change the layout string to 2006-01-02T15:04:05-0700, and don’t quote the date value within the script element, or use jsonify (preferred).

1 Like
3

Is that behavior explained somewhere? It’s a bit irritating that some of the parameters must be enclosed in quotes and others better be not…

4

I am sorry that you are irritated.

First, per the JSON specification, these two strings are equivalent:

2023-11-15T15:47:00\u002b0000
2023-11-15T15:47:00+0000

Your desire to use the latter is a cosmetic preference, not a functional requirement.

Second, the idiomatic way to render JSON is to marshal a map using the jsonify function.

Third, rendering of quoted and unquoted pipelines is handled by Go’s html/template package, which uses Go’s encoding/json package when the pipeline is in a JavaScript context. Instead of digging into why these packages do what they do, I suggest you either (a) don’t worry about cosmetics, or (b) use the jsonify function.

Finally, if you want to bypass this aspect of Hugo’s security model, redefine the HTML output format, setting isPlainText to true. Note that this will effectively disable built-in templates; see #10922.

5

Now that you say it…

Which I actually do in other parts of the ld+json generation. But appending dict after dict to a dict is a bit tedious (compared to stinky setting a key to a value in JavaScript). Maybe a Scratch would be simpler to use in this context. I’ll explore that.

6

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