Skip to main content

Text Manipulation

Today I want to share with you a few powerful examples of what you can do with ES6 - and a little out of the box thinking, and how much it will allow you to quickly scale up in a clean fashion.

Cleaning Strings

This for me was one of those "a Ha!" moments where the answer was just staring you in the face.  I had to include it since you may typically you might think to use some elaborate library.  Take the scenario where you present the user with an input box that allows for rich text, but you want the cleanest way to only store non-unicode characters.  Try this simple one-line gem:

myCleanString = "test-_aaa'#@".replace(/[^0-9a-zA-Z-_' ]/gi, '');

The regular expression in this statement effectively says that for any characters not in this group (0-9, a-z, A-Z and symbol's hyphen, underscore, single quote and space), replace them with an empty string.  Do this for the characters of your choosing.

DB Inserts/Updates

Here I like to use the power of objects with ES6, and this assumes that you are using (and if you are not, you should) prepared statements.  Rather than altering the query each time, it is much simpler and cleaner to have an object as the item you are inserting/updating to the database.  Take for example this insert:

Easy, right? Now the query can remain static - any changes you make to the object will cleanly update the SQL.  If you are doing an update, the approach is more or less the same, except I have a function which extends the functions of the Object's prototype:

So here we are adding a function which rearranges the object to an array of <key> = ?.  Either of the queries you are going to do, this can then be binded with:

d.query(sql,Object.values(obj));

Cleaning HTML entities

From passing data to and from a database and a web page, you'll more than likely have come across dealing with string that contain the &#39; for being a single quote - ecetera.  Just include this tiny function:

Using regular expression, it will find these string segments, and return the string character from the number.  Something like this should have come out of the box - but there you go!

Hope one or more of these tips makes your day just that little bit brighter.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

question2answer Wordpress Integration

 Today I want to journal my implementation of a WordPress site with the package of "question2answer".  It comes as self-promoted as being able to integrate with WordPress "out of the box".  I'm going to vent a small amount of frustration here, because the only integration going on is the simplicity of configuration with using the same database, along with the user authentication of WordPress.  Otherwise they run as two separate sites/themes. This will not do. So let's get to some context.  I have a new hobby project in mind which requires a open source stack-overflow clone.  Enter question2answer .  Now I don't want to come across as completely ungrateful, this package - while old, ticks all the boxes and looks like it was well maintained, but I need every  page to look the same to have a seamless integration.  So, let's go through this step by step. Forum Index Update This step probably  doesn't need to be done, but I just wanted to mak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Running NodeJS Serverless Locally

 So it's been a long time, but I thought this was a neat little trick so I thought I'd share it with the world - as little followers as I have.  In my spare time I've been writing up a new hobby project in Serverless , and while I do maintain a staging and production environment in AWS, it means I need to do a deployment every time I want to test all of the API's I've drafted for it. Not wanting to disturb the yaml configuration for running it locally, I've come up with a simple outline of a server which continues to use the same configuration.  Take the express driven server I first define here: And then put a index.js  in your routes folder to contain this code: Voila! This will take the request from your localhost and interpret the path against your serverless.yml and run the configured function.  Hope this helps someone!
Post a Comment
Read more

Google Sheets Web App

 Greetings! Has been yet another long period since my last post, but hopefully the type of content makes up for it.  Today I'm writing about a need that I had to document my entire movie collection in Google Sheets, because some that were on my local network, some on DVD, some on my Playstation Video account and as well as my small collection in Google TV.  All in all there is currently over 500 movies, and growing. So the spreadsheet is fine on its own, but something nice and "pretty" was needed to list, search and filter by the movie's attributes.  I first got an API key to be used with  OMDB API .  This allows me to get a JSON of the movie's IMDB attributes with a search from the title.  I then added two functions in the "Apps Script" component of the sheet: From here, I could call the function to search (from a cell) with: =API(CONCAT("http://www.omdbapi.com/?apikey=*******&t=",ENCODEURL(A1))) That would return the JSON (assuming A1 is...
Post a Comment
Read more