Thanks Steve.
But I still get the same result
You think this is a Smarty bug?
Running your code always returns "true". It seems to always run the smarty code inside the js "if" statement whether it passes or fails in respect to javascript... kinda sucks...
I even went ahead and downloaded smarty and created a seperate project - thinking it may be some x-cart restrictions to smarty or something - but no dice, still the same behavior.