I've just tried it on IE 8, and the test page runs successfully, if slowly, so it appears to be a Firefox-specific issue.

It looks like you're trying to parse an XML string with

$()

and that's not supported. Only HTML strings can be passed. If I've interpreted the test case incorrectly, reply with an explanation of what's going on.

Firefox seems to be dying on the constructor check for HTML, which uses a RegExp:

match = quickExpr.exec( selector );

The string you're passing in is long and html-ish, and I suspect Firefox is backtracking heavily trying to match the huge string. We can either assume a long (>1K chars) string must be HTML or come up with a RegExp that doesn't need to backtrack so much.

Should I move this to the documentation component then? It looks like I'm not the only one who mistakenly thinks XML parsing is supported, see these tutorials listed on the main JQuery site at http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:

http://marcgrabanski.com/articles/jquery-makes-parsing-xml-easy

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/10/10/jquery-and-xml.html

The only documentation I can find by doing a Google query of 'site:jquery.com xml parsing not supported' is this forum thread mentioning it at the end.

http://forum.jquery.com/topic/what-is-the-status-of-jquery%E2%80%99s-multi-argument-content-syntax-deprecated-supported-documented

This bug may now be fixed. The recent Regex improvements (see #7062) included a change to the quickExpr regex which dramatically reduced the backtracking it required for the case of non-matches.

I checked out the newest version from git, and I still have the same problems as the TS.

@ridgerunner: Were the changes committed to git, or were you talking about a non-git patch to reduce the backtracking?

Can anyone confirm for sure whether this issue is still being experienced using the new 1.4.3 RC2?

Please confirm whether or not this issue still occurs with jQuery 1.4.3. Thank you!

I've confirmed that the problem doesn't occur with 1.4.3, so this bug can be closed

The low limit still exists in Firefox. Given this, I think dmethvin's suggestion to assume anything over 1K is HTML is reasonable.

In my case, I'm using the jstree plugin which is taking a rather large XML document and using XSLT to turn it to a string containing an HTML nested list, which it then passes to jQuery's constructor to create DOM objects. I get the "stack quota" error in the same RegExp call mentioned in this ticket.

To reproduce, open http://jsfiddle.net/6GvyJ/ with Firefox (in my case 3.6.13) with Firebug enabled. The script simply dynamically creates a large string containing the html for an unordered list. I've tweaked the len variable to be right over the edge of Firefox's limit. Set len to 71859 and the script will work.

In Chrome, I was able to set len to several hundred thousand before I started having issues.