Question

I’d held off on posting here since I don’t feel I have the skill level yet to give back to the community, but this one has me totally stumped.

I have a recursive JavaScript function that appends a counter to the end of all id and name elements in a node tree. The function works in FF, Chrome, Safari, and IE9, but not IE8.

function counterAppend(nodes,counter)
{
    var newField = nodes.childNodes;
    for (var i=0;i<newField.length;i++)
    {
        var theName = newField[i].name;
        if (theName)
        {
            newField[i].name = theName + counter;
        }
        var theId = newField[i].id;
        if (theId)
        {
            newField[i].id = theId + counter;
        }

        //recursive part
        if(newField[i].childNodes.length>0)
        {
            newField[i] = counterAppend(newField[i],counter);
        }
    }
    return nodes;
}

I get the error on the line:
newField[i] = counterAppend(newField[i],counter);

In debug, it says:
Breaking on JS runtime error – Object doesn’t support this property or method

What is different between IE8 and the other browsers, and how can I modify this to work around the error?

Answer 1

Why are you assigning the return of the function back over the newField[i]? I have no idea what you expect this to do. If the code is just modifying the ids/names you shouldn’t need a return value. I should think it is this that is confusing IE, I’m not sure why it isn’t confusing the other browsers…