Serialize JavaScript's navigator object
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Published on 2011-02-11T14:34:51Z
Indexed on
2011/02/11
15:25 UTC
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JavaScript
|serialization
Hi, I'm creating a page to help diagnose the problem our users are experiencing with our web pages (you know, asking a user "What browser are you using?" usually leads to "Internet").
This page already submits to me all the HTTP headers and now I'm trying to have JavaScript give some more informations, so I thought it would be great to have the user's navigator JavaScript object and I started looking how to serialize it so I can submit it through a form.
The problem is I'm not able to serialize the navigator object using any JSON library I know of, everyone returns an empty object (?!), so I decided to write an ad-hoc serializer.
You can find the code here:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function serialize (object) {
var type = typeof object;
if (object === null) {
return '"nullValue"';
}
if (type == 'string' || type === 'number' || type === 'boolean') {
return '"' + object + '"';
}
else if (type === 'function') {
return '"functionValue"';
}
else if (type === 'object') {
var output = '{';
for (var item in object) {
if (item !== 'enabledPlugin') {
output += '"' + item + '":' + serialize(object[item]) + ',';
}
}
return output.replace(/\,$/, '') + '}';
}
else if (type === 'undefined') {
return '"undefinedError"';
}
else {
return '"unknownTypeError"';
}
};
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#navigator').text(serialize(navigator));
});
</script>
<style type="text/css">
#navigator {
font-family: monospaced;
}
</style>
<title>Serialize</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Serialize</h1>
<p id="navigator"></p>
</body>
</html>
This code seems to work perfectly in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari but (obviously) doesn't work in Internet Explorer (at least version 8.0), it complains that "Property or method not supported by the object" at line for (var item in object) {.
Do you have any hint on how to fix the code or how to reach the goal (serialize the navigator object) by other means?
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