660371 - "Invalid quantifer" errors in regular expressions aren't reported in standard form by js shell

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Eric Promislow]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Given these this three-line program:
var a = 3;
var s = /abc:(*?)def/;
var c = 4;

the js shell just reports 
"invalid quantifier"

instead of following the form of other error messages, as given
in the Expected Results field.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Build Mozilla with the js shell.

Create the file with the above three lines.  Run the command
[path to js]/js foo.js  

Actual Results:  
invalid quantifier


Expected Results:  
I would expect output like so:
foo.js:2: SyntaxError: invalid quantifier:
foo.js:2: var s = /abc:(*?)def/;
foo.js:2: ..............^

Although that third line is somewhat hopeful on my part.
But instead I'm not getting any line number.

Comment 1

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

This behavior is present even before the recent Yarr landing. It seems to relate to some detail of Spidermonkey error reporting.

Comment 2

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This behavior is present even before the recent Yarr landing. It seems to
> relate to some detail of Spidermonkey error reporting.

It did regress on the first Yarr landing, though. So that should help in tracking it down.

Comment 3

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

Attachment: Patch to enable syntax error reporting

There are actually 2 separate regressions from the pre-Yarr behavior here:

1. Syntax errors in regexp literals aren't getting reported as syntax errors, but just get a raw error string instead.

2. We used to show the point of the error within the regexp text, but now we don't.

#1 is the more serious one, and easier to fix: the patch is for that.

#2 is less serious, and harder to fix: it would require teaching Yarr to report the point at which syntax errors occur. Should be possible, but it would be nice to coordinate with WebKit. So let's let this be a followup bug.

Comment 4

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/rev/38322c7498ff

Comment 5

[Chris Leary [:cdleary] (not checking bugmail)]

cdleary-bot mozilla-central merge info:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/38322c7498ff