Follow-up: Safari and String.replace() caveat

Following up on the Safari and String.replace() issue, it looks like this is a known bug that is fixed in the Webkit CVS tree but not yet part of any public release of Safari. So, if you're a junkie for nightly builds, you should be golden. (Your customers, on the other hand, are probably not so golden.)

MacIE's numbered days

MSFT is officially pulling the plug IE5 for the Mac:

In accordance with published support lifecycle policies, Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and will provide no further security or performance updates.

Additionally, as of January 31st, 2006, Internet Explorer for the Mac will no longer be available for download from Mactopia. It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari.

So long, old buddy.

BONUS: best comment via Slashdot: "Couldn't they have just emailed both people still using IE on the Mac and saved themselves the trouble of a whole press release."

Y! JavaScript Dev Center

Yahoo!'s JavaScript Developer Center looks pretty sweet.

Safari and the String.replace() method

JavaScript strings have a cool method called replace() which allows you to supply a regular expression and replace the matched bits of the string with another string.

var str = "my dog has fleas";
str = str.replace(/dog/, "cat");

Output:

my cat has fleas

One of the cooler things about this is you can provide an expression as the second argument. This can be a variable:

var str = "my dog has fleas";
var str2 = "cat"
str = str.replace(/dog/, str2);

...or even a function:

function Cat() {
  return "cat";
}
str = str.replace(/dog/, Cat);

This works great in IE, and Firefox on both Windows and OS X.

But Safari? Not so much. Here's the output of that last example in Safari:

my function Cat() {return "cat";} has fleas

Ugh, what happened? It appears that when given a function in this context, Safari does not evaluate it as an expression, but instead calls the toString() method of the function, casting it into a string.

I haven't found a workaround. Have you?