The json gem does not allow for directly encoding strings to their JSON representation. I tentatively ported this PHP code:
$text = json_encode($string);
to this Ruby:
text = string.inspect
and it seemed to do the job but for some reason if the string itself contains a literal string (it's actually JS code) with newlines, these newlines \n will stay as-is \n, not be encoded to \\n. I can understand if this is the correct behaviour of #inspect, but...
How does one encode a string value to its JSON representation in Ruby?