The String.prototype.split method is very handy, so it's a shame that if you use a regular expression as its delimiter, the results can be so wildly different cross-browser that odds are you've just introduced bugs into your code (unless you know precisely what kind of data you're working with and are able to avoid the issues). Here's one example of other people venting about the problems. Following are the inconsistencies cross-browser when using regexes with
split:- 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). This doesn't make any sense to me, since IE does include empty values when using a string as the delimiter.
- Internet Explorer and Safari do not splice the values of capturing parentheses into the returned array (this functionality can be useful with simple parsers, etc.)
- Firefox does not splice
undefinedvalues into the returned array as the result of non-participating capturing groups. - Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari have various additional edge-case bugs where they do not follow the split specification (which is actually quite complex).
