One thing that I think would be cool is if JavaScript provided a way to pass arguments to a function by name. About two years ago I wrote the code for a Function.prototype.invoke but never released it as part of jPaq like I had hoped. Recently, I decided to re-use Read more…
A few days ago someone asked me how I would go about determining the unicode escape sequence for an arbitrary character. Of course, I went to Google Chrome’s web console and showed them how it can be done by using the charCodeAt, toString, and slice functions. The following is a Read more…
So, after doing even more research on providing prototypal functions access to private data, I came across this article on the Safe Factory Pattern. It is actually similar to my Accessor Verification pattern that I recommended here on Monday. The quick summary is that by shortening this a bit, you Read more…
A while back many people responded to this post, helping me see that my solution for providing private data access to prototypal functions was incomplete. Since then, I had been playing around with some possible solutions in my head and finally came up with two: Prototypal Registry Accessor Verification Prototypal Read more…
A few months ago I wrote a blog post about extensions to the Date.prototype. That post provided ways to add date parts and subtract date parts. Today’s post shows you how to use a generic Date.prototype.diff() function to find the difference between two dates and optionally return a string specifying Read more…
A while back I wrote this post about having classes with prototype functions that have access to private variables. To clarify this discussion, I have created this slideshow which briefly outlines how to accomplish writing JavaScript classes with private members which are accessible by prototype functions. In addition, the following Read more…
Recently someone tested my knowledge of JavaScript and asked me what types of native data structures exist which can contain an arbitrary amount of data. My answer was that Arrays and Objects can both do this right out of the box. He said that I was mostly correct, but that 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…
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…
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…