12th September 2007

Stupid Javascript Mistakes

posted in Technology, Developers |

I’m working on a project that involves Javascript and I just got stuck for something like 2 hours. For some reason my .js file was mysteriously not running. IE was not showing any errors, just not running anything in the script. I tried using the debugger, but nothing. I tried putting an alert(”begin”) at the top and alert(”end”) at the bottom and nothing.

After spending far too long spinning in circles I thought of trying to run the file from the command line. Sure enough it spits out a syntax error. I had written
if(myobj.value ! "")
and left off the =. It should have been
if(myobj.value != "")

Still, it was very annoying that IE wasn’t spitting out any error messages. Even more annoying was how long it took me to catch this. I think I’ll use the cmd-line to syntax check Javascript more in the future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Technology, Developers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 2 responses to “Stupid Javascript Mistakes”

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  1. 1 On September 18th, 2007, Jonah Burke said:

    Firebug would have caught this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843. Or Venkman: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/. In my experience, you’re better off using Firefox for testing and debugging Javascript.

  2. 2 On September 18th, 2007, Alex said:

    True. I’m afraid I have to admit that this is for t a project that is IE only, hence the need to find the issues in IE.

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