101070 - microsoft.com - Using "/" character unescaped in RegExp literals is non-ECMA

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P1)

Description

[Phil Schwartau]

This was discovered in:

                              bug 98306
                              bug 99377
                              bug 99667


At the webpages given in these bugs, all at http://msdn.microsoft.com/, 
syntax like this is used:


this.userAgent.match(/Mozilla[/].*(95[/]NT|95|NT|98|3.1).*Opera.*(\d+)\.(\d+)/)



Notice the use of the character "/" in the RegExp literal. According 
to the ECMA-262 Final spec, the character "/" must be ESCAPED by "\"
if used inside a RegExp literal. It can only be unescaped if passed to
the RegExp() function or constructor. See bug 98306 for documentation.


This incorrect syntax causes Mozilla to report a JS syntax error
every time such code is encountered at http://msdn.microsoft.com

Comment 1

[Phil Schwartau]

Raising severity to major because of the importance of this site.
Note the fix is easy to implement -

Comment 2

[Waldemar Horwat]

I can't reproduce this.  Some of the MSDN pages load fine for me, while some
don't show up at all.  What is the exact URL of the MSDN web page script that
contains the [/]'s, and what page directly calls that script?

Comment 3

[John Morrison]

The URL for the JS that contains the [/] subpattern is 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/code/browdata.js

It is included in many (most?) pages on that site, for example, the frameset:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/refere
nce/dhtmlrefs.asp
in a child frame of that frameset:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/dhtmlrefs.asp?frame=t
rue

(Although, frankly, this bug seems somewhat quixotic to me :-]

Comment 4

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

contacted 12/8

Comment 5

[Brant Gurganus]

I am not getting errors although the code doesn't seem to have changed.

Comment 6

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

did not see the error in:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/toolbar/toolbar.js
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/toolbar/en-us/global.js
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/include/ctredir.js

-> fixed.