var retotal = totaler.updateTotal.bind(totaler); retotal(); The method runs, error free. Function#bind is most useful when dealing with event assignment. Switching the con- text in which an event handler runs is something we’ll need to do quite often in the chapters to come. Summary We’ve taken a brief glance at two useful models for DOM scripting: functional and object- oriented programming. These models, in fact, go far beyond contrived code patterns; they’re manifestations of core features of JavaScript. Functional programming is right at home in the event-driven world of browser scripting; OOP is a corollary of JavaScript’s principles of mutability and scope. You’ll be able to appreciate these pillars of JavaScript coding philosophy as we delve into the use cases presented in Part 2. CHAPTER 7 ■ ADVANCED JAVASCRIPT: FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING AND CLASS-BASED OOP 165 Other Helpful Things: Useful Methods on Built-Ins As embarrassing as it is for me to have a chapter devoted to “other random stuff,” I’ve decided to write it anyway. This book isn’t meant to teach you JavaScript; it’s meant to be a survey of a framework that acts as JavaScript’s “standard library.” Prototype sticks utility methods in appropriate nooks and crannies, some of which are simply too general to have been addressed in an earlier chapter. This chapter, then, will explore the convenience methods that Prototype adds to built-in objects. Many of them are used within Prototype itself, but they’re likely to be useful in your own code as well. Using String Methods I’m at a loss here. What can I say about strings? Strings in JavaScript bear good news and bad news. The bad news is that many of the conveniences that other languages possess for dealing with strings simply aren’t present in JavaScript. The good news is that, as we’ve done elsewhere, we can leverage the hackability of the language to fix this shortcoming. String Utility Methods Prototype adds a bagful of useful instance methods to strings. Some you’ll use every day; some rarely, if ever. But they’re there in case you need them. The gsub, sub, and scan Methods These first three methods all involve searching for text in a string and doing something with the result. 167 CHAPTER 8 At first glance, String#gsub would appear to be redundant—it behaves just like String#replace and has a weirder name. At second glance, though, it will become your method of choice for string substitution. Short for “global substitution,” gsub is named after the similar method in Ruby. Like replace, it takes two arguments: a pattern and a replacement. The pattern can be a string or a regular expression; the replacement can be a string or a function. Let’s look at the simplest case—both arguments as strings: "Never, never pour salt in your eyes.".gsub('never', 'always'); //-> "Never, always pour salt in your eyes." Wait—that’s not what we meant. We want to replace both never and Never, so let’s change that first argument to a case-insensitive regular expression. ■Tip Do regular expressions intimidate you? If so, this section might not be for you. Type “regular expres- sions” into your favorite search engine if you need a crash course. "Never, never pour salt in your eyes.".gsub(/never/i, 'always'); //-> "always, always pour salt in your eyes." OK, that problem was easy to solve—JavaScript allows us to ignore case by using the i flag at the end of a regular expression. But now we’ve got a new problem. The first “never” has a capital N, since it’s the first word of the sentence. We need to ensure that a capitalized word has a capitalized replacement. To do this, let’s get a little cleverer with our regular expression. We can experiment with JavaScript’s RegExp#exec until we have one that suits our needs better. RegExp#exec accepts a string, applies the given regular expression against it, and returns an array of matches: /never/.exec("Never, never pour salt in your eyes."); //-> ["never"] /never/i.exec("Never, never pour salt in your eyes."); //-> ["Never"] You’ll notice the matches themselves are arrays, too. The first item in this array is the full match. If there are any captures in the expression—indicated by parentheses—then those submatches are also given in the order they occur. Since we’re trying to figure out if “never” is capitalized or not, let’s capture the first letter of the pattern: CHAPTER 8 ■ OTHER HELPFUL THINGS: USEFUL METHODS ON BUILT-INS168 /(n)ever/i.exec("Never, never pour salt in your eyes."); //-> ["Never", "N"] Armed with this insight, let’s go back to gsub and swap out the second argument. We’ll turn it into a function—one that decides on a proper replacement string for each match. "Never, never pour salt in your eyes.".gsub(/(n)ever/i, function(match) { if (match[1] === match[1].toUpperCase()) return "Always"; else return "always"; }); //-> "Always, always pour salt in your eyes." Notice that this function takes one argument, match, which corresponds to each match of the pattern as would be returned by String#match. Two other methods, sub and scan, work in a very similar way. String#sub replaces only the first match of a given pattern in a string: "Never, never pour salt in your eyes.".sub(/never/i, 'Always'); //-> "Always, never pour salt in your eyes." And String#scan is used for executing a function against each match of a pattern: // find all four-letter words in a phrase var warning = "Never, never pour salt in your eyes.", fourLetterWords = []; warning.scan(/\b\w{4}\b/, function(match) { fourLetterWords.push(match[0]); }); console.log("Four-letter words: " + fourLetterWords.join(', ') ); //-> "Four-letter words: pour, salt, your, eyes" To review, all three of these methods let you search for a pattern in a string. There- fore, all three expect either a string or a regular expression as the first argument. Two of these methods, gsub and sub, replace one substring with another—gsub acts on every occurrence, while sub acts on only the first. So both can take either a string or a func- tion as the replacement. Finally, scan doesn’t do any replacement at all; it just calls a function for every occurrence of a pattern. The strip Method Sounds scandalous, I know, but it’s pretty mundane. String#strip simply removes all leading and trailing spaces from a string: " foo ".strip(); //-> "foo" CHAPTER 8 ■ OTHER HELPFUL THINGS: USEFUL METHODS ON BUILT-INS 169 In the unpredictable browser environment, where whitespace fills every crack and crevice, strip helps normalize strings for comparison: var a = "bar ", b = " bar"; a == b; //-> false a.strip() == b.strip(); //-> true The stripTags, escapeHTML, and unescapeHTML Methods It’s frustrating to deal with HTML in string form, but it’s often necessary. Many Prototype methods, like Element#insert and Element#update, accept HTML strings as one way to place content into a page. It’s also important to write code that’s both defensive and secure. Let’s look at an example: <form id="blog_comment" action="/path/to/action/page"> <p> <label for="comment_name">Name </label><br /> <input id="comment_name" name="comment_name" type="text" /> </p> <p> <label for="comment_text">Comment</label><br /> <textarea id="comment_text" name="comment_text"></textarea> </p> </form> <div id="live_preview"></div> Assume that this is a standard blog comment form. We want to let the commenter preview her comment before submitting, so we’ll set a listener that will update the div with each keystroke: function updateLivePreview() { var commentText = $('comment_text').value; $('live_preview').update(commentText); } Event.observe(window, 'load', function() { $('comment_text').observe('keyup', updateLivePreview); }); CHAPTER 8 ■ OTHER HELPFUL THINGS: USEFUL METHODS ON BUILT-INS170 Load this example in a browser, and you’ll see that this code behaves the way we expect. We can type something into the textarea and see a live version in the div below (Figure 8-1). Figure 8-1. Live comment preview But it’s not enough to test typical input. We’ve also got to test how resilient it is by feeding it unexpected input. Sure enough, this code handles plain text deftly, but doesn’t like HTML all that much (see Figure 8-2). CHAPTER 8 ■ OTHER HELPFUL THINGS: USEFUL METHODS ON BUILT-INS 171 . convenience methods that Prototype adds to built-in objects. Many of them are used within Prototype itself, but they’re likely to be useful in your own code as well. Using String Methods I’m. Utility Methods Prototype adds a bagful of useful instance methods to strings. Some you’ll use every day; some rarely, if ever. But they’re there in case you need them. The gsub, sub, and scan Methods These. replacement at all; it just calls a function for every occurrence of a pattern. The strip Method Sounds scandalous, I know, but it’s pretty mundane. String#strip simply removes all leading and trailing