Javascript split() not working in IE

Question

Lets say I have a textarea with this text:

1. first line some text.
2. second line, other text. next line will be empty.
3. (empt

Answer 1

The regex split is behaving strangely in IE8 and lower. Use a string comparison instead and it seems to work (fiddle)

testText.split("\n")

rather than

testText.split(/\n/)

[Edit] From Steven Levithan's Blog:

Internet Explorer excludes almost all empty values from the resulting array (e.g., when two delimiters appear next to each other in the data, or when a delimiter appears at the start or end of the data)

Answer 2

I see the same screwy behavior in IE with .split() and new lines. You can use your own split function to control it more closely:

function mySplit(str, ch) {
    var pos, start = 0, result = [];
    while ((pos = str.indexOf(ch, start)) != -1) {
        result.push(str.substring(start, pos));
        start = pos + 1;
    }
    result.push(str.substr(start));
    return(result);    
}

Working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/xQTNZ/.

Answer 3

Possible duplicate of JavaScript: split doesn't work in IE? ? Internet Explorer excludes almost all empty values from the resulting array (e.g., when two delimiters appear next to each other in the data, or when a delimiter appears at the start or end of the data).