One of the first things that many people learn in an introduction to Computer Sciences course is the algorithm for calculating the square root of a number. The algorithm, which is often attributed to Heron of Alexandria, is as follows: Formulate a guess. Multiply that guess by itself. If the Read more…
One thing that is not extremely obvious in JavaScript is how you sort arrays. Yes, of course I know that arrays have the native sort() function, but did you know that the following will incorrectly sort the array of numbers: How crazy is that? Even though the array is in Read more…
One of the many things that you may need to become accustomed to using is some type of versioning system. One type that I use on a regular basis is SVN. Last month, due to an audit, we had to get a spreadsheet or CSV file that contained all of the records Read more…
As of JavaScript 1.8, a new prototypal function for the Date objects has been added: toISOString(). Ordinarily this returns a string similar to the following: The problem is that not all browsers support JavaScript 1.8 yet. For this reason, if you want to use this function regardless of the version Read more…
Now Available in YourJS When dealing with numbers, at times for presentation’s sake, we need to add ordinals to numbers. For example, instead of today is the “September 28”, you may want to say that it is the “28th of September”. I wrote the following code snippet to easily add Read more…
Sometimes you write code that you wish you could totally rework. That is how I feel about jPaq’s Date.prototype.format(). The real issue I have with it is that the metacharacters are not intuitive. Therefore, I decided to write a new version of this function which is more intuitive. The following Read more…
Something that you may not know about PHP and many other languages is that it provides heredoc syntax to build strings. What does this mean? Check out the following: The above puts the following into the $myCode variable as a string: You can use this syntax in many different languages: Read more…
In PHP, there are a few ways in which you can specify a string which, if it contains a variable name, the corresponding value will replace it. This process is referred to as string expansion and is talked about here on PHP.net. Unfortunately, there is no real way to implement Read more…
I am currently working on an updated version of Wormbites. In the process, I wanted to use my typeOf() function that I posted here. The only thing is, I thought it would be even better if the function would optionally take two parameters, in which case it would check to Read more…
At times, you will need to use the arguments object of a function as an array. In order to convert the arguments into an array, you can do the following: The following is an example of using this function: If you are not familiar with CDR, it is an operator Read more…