jQuery Bug: Defective Clone

I tried to append several dynamic tables to a DIV container and found something interesting.

<div id="divContainer">

    <table></table>

</div>

<script type="text/javascript">

$(function() {

    var div = $("#divContainer");

    var table = div.find("table");

    var c = 0;

    for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) 

    {

        table = table.clone();

        div.append(table);

    }

    alert(div.children().length);

    alert(div.html());

});

</script>

What will 'div.children().length' be? It should be 4 in this case, but you will get 3 in IE7 and 4 in Firefox 3. The 'alert(div.html())' provide more detail.  In IE7, the div.html() looks like this:

<TABLE jQuery1218765772477="227"><TBODY></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE jQuery1218765772477="228"><TBODY jQuery1218765772477="null"></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE jQuery1218765772477="null"><TBODY jQuery1218765772477="null"></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE jQuery1218765772477="null"> <TBODY jQuery1218765772477="null"></TBODY></TABLE>

And div.html() will return blow result in Firefox3:

<table></table><table></table><table></table><table></table>

It seemed that jQuery added additional identification information (jQuery1218765772477 attribute) in IE and some of them are 'null'.  After more experiments, I found if I modified the code to:

table2 = table.clone();
div.append(table2);

I got div.children().length==4 and

<TABLE jQuery1218765990513="231"><TBODY></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE jQuery1218765990513="232"><TBODY jQuery1218765990513="null"></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE jQuery1218765990513="233"><TBODY jQuery1218765990513="null"></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE jQuery1218765990513="234"><TBODY jQuery1218765990513="null"></TBODY></TABLE>

Every table got a unique jQuery1218765990513 attribute, so the jQuery.unique() didn't filter out the extra 'null' attribute table object .  I don't think "table = table.clone()" is illegal syntax and this should be a bug of jQuery.clone().

I just submitted this bug to http://dev.jquery.com/newticket.  If there is any update, I will post it on my blog.

【中文摘要】

明明在趕程式，被這個Bug絆住，又跟它耗了大半天。利用clone()的寫法在DIV中動態新增Table object，卻發現明明放了4個，children().length卻只傳回3，但這問題只發生在IE上，Firefox上是正常的。研究了一下，發現clone()在IE下會產生額外的Attribute識別，而使用table=table.clone()的寫法，會讓這些識別Attribute變成null，在算個數時就會被過濾掉，看來是jQuery.clone()的Bug，暫無氣力追進去修改，但我先把它Submit反應出去，如果有消息再跟大家說吧。