IE8 is not recognizing my regular expression

Question

I\'m trying to parse an AJAX response and get the id of the body tag. I can\'t do this via jQuery, though, because jQuery can\'t emulate a DOM response for a body tag.

Answer 1

Apparently, when you call (RegExp object).match(string), it increments a property of the RegExp object called lastIndex. I am not completely familiar with how the RegExp object works, but this causes an issue when trying to call the exec() method later.

The solution, apparently, is to reset lastIndex to zero.

var html = 'asdf';

var bodyIDregex = /]*id=["'](.*?)["']>/gi,
matched = html.match(bodyIDregex);
// Reset lastIndex
bodyIDregex.lastIndex = 0;
var bodyID = bodyIDregex.exec(matched[0]);
alert(bodyID.length);
bodyID = bodyID[1];

document.write(bodyID); // writes test