I am attempting to use the .data method to retrieve a JSON object that was stored in a data attribute on an element. If there are newlines present in the data attribute then the .data method will return a string instead of an object. If the newlines are removed then an object will be returned.

I have created a JSFiddle that demonstrates this behavior: http://jsfiddle.net/vickaita/5hy6Y/

It seems that there is a regexp that is used to test the value of the data attribute to see if it should be passed to jQuery.parseJSON. It is defined on line 3 of src/data.js

var rbrace = /^(?:\\{.*\\}|\\[.*\\])$/,

I believe that the .* portions of this regexp are not matching the newline characters in the attribute. Replacing them with [\\s\\S] seems to fix this issue. [\\s\\S] should match whitespace and non-whitespace characters. The new regexp would be:

/^(?:\\{[\\s\\S]*\\}|\\[[\\s\\S]*\\])$/

In a production site the whitespace would normally be stripped out, but during development it can be useful to pretty print the JSON in a data attribute with newlines.