Sometimes you get those errors that just pick at you and you can’t seem to find a solution. It happened to me this morning when testing a JavaScript library I’m writing in IE7. FireFox worked without a hitch, but IE threw an ‘expected identifier, string or number’ error pointing to the last line of the variable declaration. Of course it didn’t help that my copy of MS Script Debugger wanted to lock up my computer.
Here’s a very shortened example of the code I was working on.
JavaScript:
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var variableName =
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{
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function1: function()
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{
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// Do something
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},
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function2: function()
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{
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// Do something else
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},
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variable1: ‘Some value’,
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variable2: ‘Another value’,
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};
The error was reporting a problem on line 13. So after hacking my way around trying to figure out why it was giving me this error, I went out Googling. About 10 pages into the search results I found the solution.
Look at line 12. See the comma after ‘Another value’? That’s what was causing the error. I had taken out a variable under that one but forgot to remove the comma. FireFox ignored the error, but not IE.
One little misplaced character, so much wasted time. Hopefully y’all will spend less time finding the fix than I did.
Related Articles
- Learn to Code Epilogue: Best Practices and Additional Resources [Video] (lifehacker.com)
- Uncover JavaScript JSON Parsing errors with IE Compatibility Mode (dynatrace.com)
- Eloquent JavaScript (oreilly.com)
- Filter an Array using JavaScript (devcurry.com)
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NetWidZ..! 