Tabs break nothing!

I mentioned in my last post that I would be taking something on to add to my 0.2, so I did processing.js ticket #351 and wrapped it up the same day. Not bad, but it was easy.

In my last post I talked about how I was able to reproduce the bug, and the next step was to find, where in the code, variables are changed to var. This is what the code in question looked like before I got to it.

    // float foo = 5;
    aCode = aCode.replace(/(?:static\s+)?(?:final\s+)?(\w+)((?:\[\])+| ) *(\w+)\[?\]?(\s*[=,;])/g, function (all, type, arr, name, sep) {
      if (type === "return") {
        return all;
      } else {
        return "var " + name + sep;
      }
    });

What is happening, is it's matching a regular expression to the code to be parsed, sending the matched groups into a function in the order of (all, type, arr, name, sep) the first parameter is always the whole matching string, and each one that follows is the next match group and so on. The function will do something with the sent values, in this case, swapping the variable type for "var " and removing any array brackets. this new string is then replaced with the original matching string.

The problem was, it was only doing this if there was a space between "int i" this is a closer look at the culprit "(\w+)((?:\[\])+| ) *(\w+)" first it matches a word, something like int, char, anything like that, then it look for any number of [] OR a space, then 0 or more spaces, then another word. I simply changed the spaces to \s, which included all whitespace, including tab, and not just a space, resulting in this.

    // float foo = 5;
    aCode = aCode.replace(/(?:static\s+)?(?:final\s+)?(\w+)((?:\[\])+|\s)\s*(\w+)\[?\]?(\s*[=,;])/g, function (all, type, arr, name, sep) {
      if (type === "return") {
        return all;
      } else {
        return "var " + name + sep;
      }
    });

Now when a tab is found between int i; it's not ignored, the parsing of int i; is not ignored.