parseInt Bug in Firefox, IE6 and IE7

Quick Entry:

There is a bug in shipping versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox wherein if you attempt to use parseInt on a number with leading zeros, the value returned will be incorrect for "08" and for "09" due to the Javascript interpreter thinking these are, in fact, Octal numbers (and there being no "Octal" value greater than 7, the value returned is "0").

Try it.  Copy/Paste the following Javascript into your browser's url:

javascript:alert(parseInt("08"))

Anyway, a somewhat esoteric bug perhaps but it did cause an infinite loop today when I was attempting to scan over a date range where the dates were stored with leading zeroes.

The fix?

USE parseInt( var, 10) instead.

The second parameter ensures that the parseInt operation will be done using base10

fetchNVPValue - routine to extract a value from a querystring

There are probably more efficient - and more bullet-proof - ways to do this, but figured I had better capture this before I forgot that I wrote it.

Shannon Norrell

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// fetchNVPValue( string aNVPName, string aURL )
//           Extracts the value of a Named Value Pair (NVP) from a URL
//       eg: fetchNVPValue( "name", "http://mypage.com?id=123&name=Shannon&foo=bar" ) returns "Shannon"
//
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
function fetchNVPValue( aNVPName, aURL ) {
  var retVal = "";
  var bItsInThereSomeWhere = (aURL.toLowerCase().indexOf(aNVPName) > -1);
  // If we have a URL, a name to look for and it's in there somewhere ...
  if ( aNVPName && aURL && bItsInThereSomeWhere ) {
    var theURL = aURL.toLowerCase().replace(/\+/g, ' ');    // Turn all '+' signs back into spaces, if applicable
    var args = theURL.split("&");
    for (var i=0;i<args.length;i++) {
      var nvp = args[i].split("="); // Break out each argument out into a NVP
      var name  = unescape(nvp[0]);
      if (name==aNVPName) {
        retVal = nvp[1];
        break;
      }
    }
  }
  // If we still haven't extracted it and it's in there somewhere, the Named value follows a "?" in the URL, rather than a &
  if (( retVal == "") && bItsInThereSomeWhere) {
    if (aURL.toLowerCase().indexOf("?" + aNVPName) > -1) {
      retVal = aURL.split("?")[1].split("=")[1];
    }
  }
  return retVal;
}