Comments on: jQuery, JSON and IE – Getting Incorrect Array Length

By: Meag

Meag — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:35:08 +0000

Thanks, bud. I could foresee this fix being a big pain in the a$$ – toth for keeping your post up.

By: Kyle Weems

Kyle Weems — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:12:41 +0000

@Charles – I completely agree that IE’s debug information is probably the most useless in the world. It drives me batty.

By: Charles St-Pierre

Charles St-Pierre — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:34:06 +0000

[slap my forehead] Of course! Thanks for this article.

And no matter if IE is right in doing this way, I’m still mad at it for giving me useless debug informations.

“is null or not an object” WTH?!?

By: Jerry Carter

Jerry Carter — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:45:19 +0000

Rock it. That was exactly my issue. thanks!!!

By: Kyle Weems

Kyle Weems — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:35:51 +0000

@Joe – Well… that’s a good point. I’ll admit, I’m so accustomed to IE interpreting something the wrong way that I often jump to conclusions and assume a behavioral difference between Internet Explorer and any other browser means that IE is behaving incorrectly.

Score a point for IE. And actually, it’s probably lazy programming to include that trailing comma, so I can’t really call IE to task for being strict about it.

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:29:17 +0000

First, I am by no means a fan of Internet Explorer — I use Firefox as my browser in linux, and I’m a web developer and all versions of IE to date are the bane of my career. However, this is one of those rare cases where IE is actually interpreting the RFC for JSON (RFC4627) correctly. Granted, the RFC does not explicitly say that the trailing comma “MUST NOT” exist, or “SHOULD NOT” exist, the grammar used to describe the comma-separated lists clearly shows that a value should come after the value-separator:

> object = begin-object [ member *( value-separator member ) ] end-object

> array = begin-array [ value *( value-separator value ) ] end-array

So this is actually Firefox being generous and allowing value-separator to *not* be followed by a value, which is sort of going against the RFC. For a PHP developer, having a trailing comma with no value following it is allowed, and many developers add it by default in order to prevent parse errors that occur when you add a new element to the list and forget the comma. But one must admit it’s non-standard and unneeded, so strict interpretation should require that a value follows a value-separator.