Safari Support with XRegExp 0.2.2

When I released XRegExp 0.2 several days ago, I hadn't yet tested in Safari or Swift. When I remembered to do this shortly afterwards, I found that both of those WebKit-based browsers didn't like it and often crashed when trying to use it! This was obviously a Very Bad Thing, but due to major time availability issues I wasn't able to get around to in-depth bug-shooting and testing until tonight.

It turns out that Safari's regex engine contains a bug which causes an error to be thrown when compiling a regex containing a character class ending with "[\\".

// These throw an error:
[ /[[\\]/ , /[^[\\]/ , /[abc[\\]/ ]

// ...While these are all fine:
[ /[\\[]/ , /[\[\\]/ , /[[]/ , /[\\]/ , /[[\\abc]/ , /[[\/]/ , /[[(\\]/ ]

// Testing:
try {
	RegExp("[[\\]");
	alert("OK!");
} catch (err) {
	alert(err);
	/* Safari shows:
	"SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: missing terminating ] for
	character class" */
}

As a result, I've changed two instances of [^[\\] to [^\\[] and upped the version number to 0.2.2. XRegExp has now been tested and works without any known issues in all of the following browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 5.5 – 7
  • Firefox 2.0.0.4
  • Opera 9.21
  • Safari 3.0.2 beta for Windows
  • Swift 0.2

You can get the newest version here.

3 thoughts on “Safari Support with XRegExp 0.2.2”

  1. Hi.

    I have now published my SweetXML parser, using your XRegExp.

    I developed it first without using your code, and you will be pleased to here that it was a 5 minute swap-in. Worked a dream, with no errors.

    Julian

  2. Sweet!

    SweetButty seems like the perfect kind of project to use XRegExp… a regex intensive app, which becomes much more self-documenting though named capture.

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