Question

While I was fixing some js syntax to avoid problems with minification I spotted this block in a third-party js library:

if ('\u0041' == 'A') {
   var u = n.userAgent;
   if (u.indexOf('Safari') == -1) { 
     [...] 
   }
}

The block has no else condition following, and basically checks for browser type and version… anyway I don’t see why it should compare between the unicode code for the ‘A’ character and, well, the ‘A’ character! :/

Has anybody encountered a condition like this before? Am I missing something or it’s useless?

Answer 1

It must be a pretty old library which test javaScript’s support for Unicode.

For an old Browser like Netscape Navigator 4, it only supports Latin-1 encoding '\xXX' other than full Unicode support '\uXXXX'