String literal and the unescaped line break

I recently spent about 90 minutes chasing a JS error, ‘SyntaxError string literal contains an unescaped line break’.

Line 2 was throwing the error. Always a lot of problems with line 2…

<lang="en" />
Well, that clears it up.

The escape character was the issue because somewhere else I was rendering something incorrectly on the page, but there was nothing obvious.

A Little Background on the app ‘Payam’ - github link

A Payam is a kind of poem, usually made by eight players. I added a feature to my app to automatically generate a new payam, making the lines of the poem from random words taken from a word list.

The list I had on hand was for making random pass phrases using 6-sided die:

Roll five times;
Generate a five-digit number (each integer between 1-6);
Look up the corresponding word on the list.

random word list
The List

I replicated five rolls to generate the number,
searched the file for it,
and returned the line, index of [6..-1] (starting at the 7th character to just return the word and not the number)
```
def random_word
    line_number = ""
    5.times do
        line_number << Random.new.rand(1..6).to_s
    end
    File.open("/Users/douglaslawrence/Development/code/rails-and-js/project-mode/payam-with-js/app/assets/other/eff_large_wordlist.txt") do |file|
        the_word = file.find {|line| line =~ /#{line_number}/ }
        return the_word[6..-1]
    end
end
```
I used this to generate a random Payam:
- ten random_word formed each of eight lines
- one random_word was the title
```
def random
  @payam = Payam.new
  @payam.title = "Random-" + random_word
  @payam.decomp = false
  @payam.current_scribe = nil
  @payam.counter = 8
  @payam.style_id = 1
  @payam.save
  for i in 0..7
      line_text = []
      10.times do
          line_text << random_word
      end
      Line.create(:text => line_text.join(" "), :auth_id => current_user.id, :count => i+1, :payam_id => @payam.id)
  end
  flash[:notice] = "Random Payam Made!"
  redirect_to root_path
end
```
  This all worked except for one situation where I was dynamically adding the lines of the payam to the DOM. It worked for ‘normal’ payams, but not for the random. What gives?
  
  It took me a long time to hunt down this error and it came down to changing one number:
  
  change
  return the_word[6..-1]
  to
  return the_word[6..-2]
  
  random_word was returning the /n newline character that was at the end of every line of the word list. This newline was the unescaped line break showing up in my string literal.
  
  Figuring this out was about 10% testing things, 5% writing code, and 85% pushing boulders with my thoughts.
  
  This is accurate
  
  Don’t judge coding work by how much typing you hear, unless you give equal weight to how much staring out the window you see.