534951 - Wrong successive matches when using regular expression with 'g' flag

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 98409

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Michal Novotny [:michal]]

Attachment: testcase

Expected result of attached testcase is :
a
c

The actual result is that the script runs forever. First match of regexp_parse("abcd") is "ab" ("a" is remembered using parentheses). Then it recursively calls regexp_parse("a") that doesn't match anything. Next match should be "cd" but it is "ab" again. So it gets stuck in the loop.

Strange is that everything works as expected if regular expression is created using new RegExp("(.).", "g") instead of /(.)./g

Comment 1

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

We conform to ES3, which specifies this buggy behavior for RegExp literals (that they are singletons with shared mutable state).

/be