ie8 var w= window.open() - "Message: Invalid argument."

Question

I have a site that has an IE8-only problem:

The code is:

var w = window.open(urlstring, wname, wfeatures, 'false');

The error is:

Message: Invalid argument.
Line: 419 Char: 5
Code: 0
URI: http://HOSTNAME/js_context.js

I have confirmed the line number of the code (the "Line" and "URI" are correct), and I understand in later versions of IE8, this is considered accurate.

I have checked all the incoming parameters in the call by dumping alerts, and they all look valid.

This problem does not happen on FF (probably 3).

UPDATE:

The problem appears to be in using assigning the result of window.open() when doing "var w". When I split the line into two statements it works in IE8.

UPDATE2:

Based on:

http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html

When a function is to be invoked immediately, the entire invocation expression should be wrapped in parens so that it is clear that the value being produced is the result of the function and not the function itself.

This is not exactly what is going on here, but I found that applying the principle solved the problem, in IE8's compatability mode.

var w = (window.open(urlstring, wname, wfeatures, false));

Answer 1

This is an old posting but maybe still useful for someone.

I had the same error message. In the end the problem was an invalid name for the second argument, i.e., I had a line like:

   window.open('/somefile.html', 'a window title', 'width=300');

The problem was 'a window title' as it is not valid. It worked fine with the following line:

   window.open('/somefile.html', '', 'width=300');

In fact, reading carefully I realized that Microsoft does not support a name as second argument. When you look at the official documentation page, you see that Microsoft only allows the following arguments, If using that argument at all:

• _blank
• _media
• _parent
• _search
• _self
• _top