This is info, not a question about strings

[anotherJEK]

For anyone who doesn't already realize this, I have been having trouble with
Internet Eplorer window freezes and have traced it to the way my code was
handling strings.
where I used

// even though this will work in every other browser tested:
var str = 'some text';
for(var i = 0; i < str.length; i++)
   {
     if(str[i] == 's') /////<<<<<< this will freeze Internet Explorer window
      { 
        // do something 
      }
   }

The following was the fix

var str = 'some text';
for(var i = 0; i < str.length; i++)
   {
     if(str.charAt(i) == 's') /////<<<<<< This will work
      { 
        // do something 
      }
   }

[Old Pedant]

It doesn't freeze in MSIE 9. On the other hand it doesn't work.

If you try doing alert(str[7]); (for example), you get just "undefined".

[anotherJEK]

All the testing I was doing, and bug chasing was in Internet Explorer 7. This would be a issue for backward compatibility most likely. Your info is useful as well.

[xelawho]

thanks for the info. IE8 returns undefined, too, fwiw

[jmrker]

Post #1 was interesting,
but for all the observations and testing in the MSIE browsers
what is the reason for the 'freeze' or 'undefined' messages?

Appears to be valid and innoculus code.
What is the underlying problem that is going on to cause this particular action?
Why would MSIE work like this?

[xelawho]

MDN says that str[7] is part of ECMAScript 5 but not ECMAScript 3, which I guess would explain the IE<9 thing

I'm surprised because IE8 can return str.length correctly and I was under the impression that anything with a length could be accessed using array notation.

But I guess not.