Home/ Questions/Q 9188403
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-17T19:59:51+00:00

I have a webpage that I recently changed that works great on all browsers

  • 0

I have a webpage that I recently changed that works great on all browsers except for IE7. On IE7 I see the following:

SCRIPT1014: Invalid character blah.html, line 1 character 1

Screenshot:

enter image description here

I’ve reviewed the code several times and nothing sticks out. I know its a javascript error, but I can’t pinpoint where.

The frustrating part is not knowing where to look (line 1 character 1) and the error being vague.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Error in a Nutshell

    The problem was a javascript error inside a string in a call to window.setTimeout.

    More Detail

    The string in window.setTimeout([string], [int]) is executed as an eval, so it caused a javascript error during execution, which for me happened to be during the window onload event.

    Why did the error say “Invalid Character”?

    Because I used a # instead of a $ to start a jquery command. The javascript compiler didn’t know what to do with # so it threw an error.

    Why did the error report being on line 1 character 1?

    Since the string in the window.setTimeout is executed as an eval, the error was reported on line 1 character 1 – which finally makes sense!

    Sample html to replicate issue

    Here is a sample page I created demonstrating the issue:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Test Page</title>
    <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.0.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Test Page</h1>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function(){
            window.setTimeout("#('#sdfl');", 1000);
        });
    </script>
</body>
</html>

    Resolution

    I accidentally used a # instead of a $ for a jquery command in the eval string. This is actually legacy code, so I refactored it to call a specific function rather than invoke an eval on a string (evil) so it now looks more like:

    window.setTimeout(function(){
      $('#sdfl');
   }, 1000);

    Note that with this change that finding the original error would’ve been much easier as it would’ve given a specific line and character number relative to the page rather than the eval string.

    • 0