I encountered this weird bug while working on an internal library for my work. We use App Script which is based on Javascript. However, there is a weird quirk with the string.replace() function that is causing problems.
Managers often include spaces when sending commands to our email bot so we have a function in a library which removes whitespace. It is:
function cleanSpaces(string){
return string.replace(/s/g,"")
}
This function works fine unless the string has at least 2 ampersands separated by at least 1 whitespace character and no other characters.
This is a problem because some of the commands sent to the email bot use special characters, including %s to encode data for the request. Inconsistent behaviors when processing the data could cause problems long term, and I don’t know if this bug affects any other special characters.
For testing, I made a function in apps script and a dummy html page. The apps script test function has the following code (with ‘testString’ replaced with the test string):
function myFunction() {
let string = 'testString'
Logger.log(cleanSpaces(testString))
}
And the html document has the following code (with ‘testString’ replaced with the test string):
<html><body>
<p id="test"></p>
<script>
let string = 'testString';
string = string.replace(/s/g,"");
document.getElementById("testString").innerHTML = string;
</script>
</body></html>
When the string is set to something like ‘Hello World’, both functions correctly output HelloWorld
When the string is set to something like ‘ % 4 %4% 4%’, both functions correctly output %4%4%4%
However, when the string is set to something like ‘% %’, the html document correctly outputs %% but the Apps Script incorrectly outputs %.
Could someone please let me know why this happens and what (if anything) can be done to fix it.