Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    Finally, a practical use case for JavaScript generators!

    JavaScript generators are amazing. A brilliant concept infinitely useful on paper.

    They let you write infinite loops that terminate. Yield values from functions before they finish. Build lazy data structures. Lazy evaluation programming!

    A functional programmer's wet dream. 😍

    And I bet you've never used a JavaScript generator even once did you? Do you even know the syntax?

    I bet you don't.

    Turns out generators aren't very useful in practice. 😢

    But yesterday, after years of knowing about generators, years of itching to use them, years of ... I FOUND A USE! A real world practical use-case where generators actually make your code better. 😱

    We were adding automatic linking of twitter usernames to my TechLetterApp project. Find a piece of text, parse out @username instances, turn into links.

    Easy right?

    I thought so too. Complications around inserting complex nodes into an abstract syntax tree (AST) aside, parsing those usernames is hard to do elegantly.

    Unless you use generators 😛

    Here's how we did it 👇

    First, you create a regex that matches @ followed by a series of word symbols.

    const UserRegex = new RegExp(/@(\w+)/, "g")
    

    Then you create a generator that runs this regex in a loop. Each UserRegex.exec() returns the next match.

    function* getUsernames(string) {
            let match = null;
    
            do {
                match = UserRegex.exec(string);
                if (match) {
                    yield match;
                }
            } while (match);
        }
    

    We have a *getUsernames generator that takes a string. The asterisk notation changes a function to a generator.

    Inside, a loop runs as long as match has a value. Assigned on each iteration as a UserRegex.exec call.

    We yield existing values on every loop iteration. Last one will be null and we don't want to return those.

    Yield is how you return values from generators. Notice that even after returning a value, the generator keeps running. That's the generator magic 🧙‍♀️

    You can now find all usernames in a string with a loop.

    const string = "this is a test with @swizec and @kyleshevlin, maybe @lukeed05"
    
    for (const username of getUsernames(string)) {
      console.log(username)
    }
    

    That outputs

    ["@swizec", "swizec"] ["@kyleshevlin", "kyleshevlin"] ["@lukeed05", "lukeed05"]

    Here's a CodeSandbox you can play with

    Cheers, ~Swizec

    Published on April 17th, 2019 in Frontend Web, Livecoding, Technical

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about Finally, a practical use case for JavaScript generators!

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️