At times I use the String#split function in order to create an array from a string based on a RegExp delimiter. Unfortunately, today I realized that some browsers act differently than others. Let’s consider the following example:


var splitWithRegExpWorks = ','.split(/,/).length == 2;

In most browsers, the value of the above variable would be true which is what you would probably expect. Unfortunately, I found that the value in IE8 is false.

In fact, all of the following in most browsers will alert true, but in IE8 (and perhaps other strange browsers) false is alerted:

You can test any of the above snippets by simply click on the code block. FYI, you will not be able to run the code snippets as is in the console on this site because i’m using SyntaxHighlighter which seems to redefine the split function (thusly fixing the issue šŸ˜€ here).

In conclusion, it is important to realize that depending on the JavaScript engine being used, String.prototype.split can return different results if using a regular expression as the delimiter.


1 Comment

JavaScript – String.prototype.split Fix | Chris West's Blog · November 21, 2013 at 11:50 AM

[…] this post I proved that the String.prototype.split function can behave differently in IE8 and below than it […]

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