Entries For: September 2008
2008-09-15
Stupid Internet Explorer and stupid IE bugs
I'm placing the finishing touches on a web application I've been writing on and off for the last year. At last, I've reached Internet Explorer bugs, which are usually the last to be fixed. Among several other stupid but documented bugs, I've found one which I couldn't find documented in a shallow search on Google: it seems IE has an algorithm for comparing strings that is different then the one that is used internally when sorting an array of strings.
Take this code, for example, where I have separated the issue:
<html>
<body>
<script>
var x = [
"Zwischenwasse",
"Gurtis",
"Götzis",
"Partenen",
"Raggal",
"Rietz",
"Schnifis",
"Vösendorf",
"Bludenz",
"Galtür"
];
var y = [
[34241, "Zwischenwasse"],
[11223, "Gurtis"],
[12321, "Götzis"],
[12345, "Partenen"],
[32454, "Raggal"],
[34355, "Rietz"],
[43453, "Schnifis"],
[42321, "Vösendorf"],
[43435, "Bludenz"],
[43222, "Galtür"]
];
x.sort();
document.write(x);
document.write("<br/>");
var sorted = y.sort(function(a,b){
return a[1] > b[1];
});
for (var i=0;i<sorted.length;i++) {
document.write(sorted[i][1]+ ",");
}
</script>
</html>
The value which will be written in Internet Explorer when running this html document is:
Bludenz,Galtür,Gurtis,Götzis,Partenen,Raggal,Rietz,Schnifis,Vösendorf,Zwischenwasse Bludenz,Galtür,Zwischenwasse,Gurtis,Götzis,Partenen,Raggal,Rietz,Schnifis,Vösendorf,
Needless to say, in Firefox both lines will be the same, displayed in the proper order. On a side note, while I'm bashing Internet Explorer, let me just say that Internet Explorer 8 is a broken piece of software, at least on the side that I'm concerned. The developer tools are really buggy and tend to block the browser for even trivial operations (that is, when it doesn't crash it completely).
Update: apparently my mind is clouded with too much Python (I admit that Javascript is not a language that I use often). The problem is that the inline function used as sorting discriminator should return numeric values of -1, 0, 1, like this:
var sorted = y.sort(function(a,b){
if (a[1] > b[1]){
return 1;
}
if (a[1] < b[1]){
return -1
}
return 0;
});
2008-09-14
Workingenv, setuptools and svn 1.5 redux
I'm back to dealing with the incompatibility between setuptools and svn 1.5 which I have installed. Last time I've solved the problem by doing a svn checkout of http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/branches/setuptools-0.6/ and running sudo python setup.py install. Now I'm trying to do setup a virtualenv to play with repoze.catalog and I'm hitting the same problem. Of course, virtualenv comes with a hardcoded setuptools package and so it will setup a "broken" setuptools in the virtual environment. The solution is of course the same, adapted to use the virtualenv python script:
virtualenv myenv cd myenv svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/branches/setuptools-0.6/ setuptools cd setuptools ../bin/python setup.py install
This will upgrade the easy_install script to use the new setuptools library
