IE Issue with Javascript Regex replacement

Question

r = r.replace(/<TR><TD><\/TD><\/TR>/gi, rider_html);

...does not work in IE but works in all other browsers.

Any ideas or alternatives?

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

var rows = document.getElementsByTagName('tr');
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {
    var children = rows[i].children;
    if (children.length === 1 && children[0].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'td') {
        children[0].innerHTML = someHTMLdata
    }
}

Note that this sets the value of the table cell, rather than replacing the whole row. If you want to do something other than this, you'll have to use DOM methods rather than innerHTML and specify exactly what you actually want.

Answer 2

I've come to the conclusion that the variable r must not have the value in it you expect because the regex replacement should work fine if there is actually a match. You can see in this jsFiddle that the replace works fine if "r" actually has a match in it.

This is the code from fiddle and it shows the proper replacement in IE.

var r = "aa<TR><TD></TD></TR>bb";
var rider_html = " foo ";

r = r.replace(/<TR><TD><\/TD><\/TR>/gi, rider_html);
alert(r);

So, we can't really go further to diagnose without knowing what the value of "r" is and where it came from or knowing something more specific about the version of IE that you're running in (in which case you can just try the fiddle in that version yourself).

If r came from the HTML of the document, then string matching on it is a bad thing because IE does not keep the original HTML around. Instead it reconstitutes it when needed from the parsed page and it puts some things in different order (like attributes), different or no quotes around attributes, different capitalization, different spacing, etc...