Passing Data In Strings

1) To populate a dropdown control that's on a page with data coming
from the database, the developers concatenate all the values separated
by a pipe character and pass the string to the JS function, which
splits the string and adds the values to the dropdown control.

I think this is not a best practice b/c:

A) If the data returned from the database results in a string that's
too long, it could exceed the limit of the JS string type and some
items would be missing from the dropdown.

B) If by any chance, the data from the database contain pipe
character, it would result in extra elements inserted in the dropdown
control.

Is there a better way to pass data to JS w/o relying in strings? How
can these practices be improved?