Tag Archives: javascript

JavaScript Flexibility – Regex match()

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Today after two posts [#1, #2] in the past days here’s something that shows again the JavaScript power. This is not a complete example, but it’s good to start.

var str = '/text/1/text/2/';
var a = str.match(/(\d+)/gi);
console.log(a);

in that example you’ll get an array with all the numbers in the string [“1”, “2”] – yet another flexible js snippet!

Flexible JavaScript – Replace in a String

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Here’s yet another example of the JavaScript flexibility. You can simply call .replace() on every string and pass a regex as a parameter!

var str = 'my simple string';
str.replace(/ /g, '-'); // now 'str' will contain 'my-simple-string'

Flexible JavaScript – Splitting Strings

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After reviewing a chunk of my code for today I continue to admire the flexibility of JavaScript. It’s really powerful. In that example you can get a string split it by a given symbol to an array and than get the Nth element of it. All this on one line! Amazing!

var str = 'my-long-string';
str.split('-')[0]; // will contain "my"

the 1st and 2nd indexes contain respectively “long” and “string”!

Quick Look at JavaScript Objects

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JavaScript Objects

As you may know there are different notations of objects in JavaScript, and there are slight differences. However here I’m gonna achieve the same thing with different notations. The first one is the object notation in JavaScript known mostly from JSON. There you’ve to construct a key/value pairs, divided by a colon:

var class1 = {
    a : 0,
    func1 : function() {
        console.log(class1.a);
    },
    func2 : function(a) {
        this.a = a;
    }
}
class1.func2(3);

Here we have two functions – func1 and func2 and one member variable. Func2 is setting up the member variable, it’s something like a setter in some languages like Java and PHP, and the func1 is printing the value of that variable via console.log(). Note that in the body of func1() the variable “a” is accessed with the class name: class1.a. Here the notation can be changed to this.a, which will result in the same thing.

...
console.log(this.a);
...

Notation #2

While in the notation I’ve just used is not possible to have two different instances from the same class, in the next example this is possible. In JavaScript the objects are even the functions, and you can access the function’s private variables with the dot notation.

var class2 = function() {
    this.a = 0;
    this.func1 = function() {
        console.log(this.a);
    }
 
    this.func2 = function(a) {
        this.a = a;
    }
}

To use this object you’ve to use the “new” operator.

var c = new class2();
c.func2(4);

This helps you create more than one instance of the same class.

var c = new class2();
var d = new class2();
c.func2(3);
d.func2(4);

Friday Algorithms: A Data Structure: JavaScript Stack

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Algorithms and Data Structures

stack

Instead of writing about “pure” algorithms this time I’ve decided to write about data structures and to start with a stack implementation in JavaScript. However algorithms and data structures live together since the very beginning of the computer sciences. Another reason to write about data structures is that many algorithms need a specific data structure to be implemented. Most of the search algorithms are data structure dependent. You know that searching into a tree is different from searching into a linked list.

I’d like to write more about searching in my future algorithm posts, but first we need some data structure examples. The first one is, as I mentioned – stack.

Implemented in JavaScript this is really a simple example, which don’t need much to be understood. But in first place what is a stack?

You can thing of the “computer science” stack as a stack of sheets of paper, as it’s shown on the picture. You’ve three basic operations. You can add new element to the stack by putting it on the top of the stack, so the previous top of the stack becomes the second element in the stack. Another operation is to “pop” from the stack – remove the “first” element in the stack – the top most element, and to return it. And finally print the stack. This is difficult to define as an operation, but let say you’ve to show somehow every element from the stack.

Here’s a little diagram:

Stack

Source Code

At the end some source code:

var node = function()
{
    var data;
    var next = null;
}
 
var stack = function()
{
    this.top = null;
 
    this.push = function(data) {
        if (this.top == null) {
            this.top = new node();
            this.top.data = data;
        } else {
            var temp = new node();
            temp.data = data;
            temp.next = this.top;
            this.top = temp;
        }
    }
 
    this.pop = function() {
        var temp = this.top;
        var data = this.top.data;
        this.top = this.top.next;
        temp = null;
        return data;
    }
 
    this.print = function() {
        var node = this.top;
        while (node != null) {
            console.log(node.data);
            node = node.next;
        }
    }
}
 
var s = new stack();
 
s.push(1);
s.push(2);
s.push(3);
 
s.print();
 
var a = s.pop();
 
s.print();