Comments on: Expected identifier, string or … – say what?

By: jalammar

jalammar — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:55:18 +0000

I’ve been hunting down an error that only said “Expected identifier” only in IE (7). My research led me to this page. After some frustration, it turned out that the problem that I used a reserved word as a function name (“switch”). The error wasn’t clear and it pointed to the wrong line number.

I renamed the function and all was well again.

Hope this might save someone some time.

By: sidhartha

sidhartha — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:32:33 +0000

boss, it is really superb. i tried for two days and after reading this, solved it in no time. same comma played a spoilsport with me.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:16:24 +0000

Thanks! This saved me hours.

By: Referrer Detector 4.2.0.1 (and the IE pain) | phoenix.heart - portfolio & more

Sat, 23 May 2009 04:28:22 +0000

[...] it was a closing tag there… but I had some experience with it already: must be an extra comma in a JavaScript array. The problem is, I have like thousands of JavaScript lines within this plugin, and so it took me [...]

By: Ali

Ali — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:25:58 +0000

Thanks Mate, same issue with BIRT partials, worked in Chrome and Firefox, not in ie 6 or 7
Much appreciated

By: Muhaimin

Muhaimin — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:00:20 +0000

Thanks for this post. It really helps me one this minor problem… Now all my ajax are working

By: Danguba

Danguba — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:54:45 +0000

TNX 1000 times. Same stupid comma in my case

By: Sri

Sri — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:43:43 +0000

Thanks sooooooooo much!!!! Saved a lot of my hair. Was almost starting to get bald

By: Pete

Pete — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:49:12 +0000

Well guys, actually the IE version is correct as any real programmer knows. The comma is a separator and by inference it follows that after a separator comes another field.

In this case, the field is NULL since the the next command is “ignore to end of line”, followed by a close container statement.

Now because the the field is NULL, which is different from an empty string then of course the program breaks and throws an error.

Firefox handles the exception nicely, which makes their browser more fault tolerant for amateur programmmers. We professionals should still observe the programming rules for accuracy and potential reuse in other environments.

Cheers

Peter

By: Loris

Loris — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:42:51 +0000

Thanks a ton for the tip, it saved my hair too!
In my case the MS script debugger didn’t even show me the function with the error…