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JavaScript Snippet – String.prototype.after()

WARNING:
Extending native prototypes is frowned upon by many JS engineers but can be helpful as long as the extensions are properly documented in the codebase.
SCRIPTER’S DISCRETION IS ADVISED. 😆

Yesterday I added a post about String.prototype.before(...). As is explained within the post, this function can be used to easily extract a substring before a given target. Of course, if you can get what comes before a target you should be able to get what comes after a target too, right? Here is a function that makes that possible:

As indicated in the comments, this function can take a target (string or regular expression) to key off of to extract the desired substring. It also takes an optional second argument used for indicating the occurrence of the target to key off of. For instance, if you wanted to get the string that comes after the second comma in "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, y cinco" you could use the following code:

var str = "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, y cinco";
var afterFirstTwo = str.after(',', 2);

Here are some other examples that I used to test this function:

As usual, feel free to use this function in your own projects. Have fun! 😎

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JavaScript Snippet – String.prototype.before()

WARNING:
Extending native prototypes is frowned upon by many JS engineers but can be helpful as long as the extensions are properly documented in the codebase.
SCRIPTER’S DISCRETION IS ADVISED. 😆

Even though its NOT encouraged to extend native prototypes, at times you may find that doing so is pretty useful. One extension that you may find useful is String.prototype.before(...) which can be used to return the substring before a specified target. Here is the definition:

First I think its worth mentioning that depending on your preference you could choose to rename this function as String.prototype.leftOf(...) to clearly identify what it does. This function takes at least a target to find in the string which is either a string or a regexp. You may also optionally pass in a second argument which indicates the occurrence of the target to key off of. For example, if you wanted to extract the substring before the second comma in "one, two, three, and four" you could do something like the following:

var str = "one, two, three, and four";
var firstTwo = str.before(',', 2);

Of course, that is just one simple example of what you can do with this prototype extension. Check out some tests that exemplify how to use this helpful function:

Most likely if you like this function you will also want to check out the String.prototype.after(...) post. Enjoy using this helpful utility function. 😎

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Python – BeautifulSoup – Find All with Lambda Function for Attributes

Today, I had to figure out a way to parse an HTML string in Python in order to find all of the attribute values of attributes starting with a specific string. Since we already have BeautifulSoup installed, I started researching how to use a lambda function in conjunction with the attrs argument of BeautifulSoup#findAll(). Unfortunately, I didn’t figure out a way to use a callable with the attrs argument, but I did with the name:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup('
Click
Jump
')
elems = soup.findAll(lambda tag:[a for a in tag.attrs if a[0].startswith('custom-')])

After running the above code to find all elements with attributes starting with custom-, I ended up with a list of the following two elements:

[
Click
, Jump]

In order to get a list of all of the attribute values, instead of traversing the attributes of each element returned, I decided to just add a little bit to the lambda function:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup('
Click
Jump
')
custom_values = []
soup.findAll(lambda tag:[custom_values.append(a[1]) for a in tag.attrs if a[0].startswith('custom-')])
print custom_values

That resulted in this:

[u'Clicker', u'Jumper']

Pretty simple, right! 😎