[I originally filed this as Mozilla bug 524907 and 524912, where it was suggested that I bring up this topic here as well.]
Currently, String.indexOf/lastIndexOf do take a second parameter to specify where to start the search, but none for where to stop. String.search doesn't even allow to specify the start index. Hence I'd propose to implement a String.substring-like signature for these three methods: String.indexOf(searchValue[, fromIndex[, toIndex]]) String.lastIndexOf(searchValue[, fromIndex[, toIndex]]) String.search(regex[, fromIndex[, toIndex]]) Motivation: Let d be a set of delimiters and s be a long string including several of these delimiters in arbitrary order and count. Now try to process each block of text between two such delimiters in dependance upon the surrounding delimiters: - looping over each single character in s and comparing it from JS is slow (not so much in Gecko 1.9 as in Gecko 1.8, but still) - s.indexOf is useless, because it only can check for one single delimiter at a time, so you'd need one indexOf per delimiter, which may result in completely parsing s for each delimiter! - s.search(/[delimiters]/) is useless, because it always starts searching at index 0 - you would have to cut/change s after each find In theory, String.replace(regex, function) would be perfect for doing this, but I believe that the additional, optional arguments fromIndex/toIndex do make sense in their own right. Karsten _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
