Replace Repeated Characters with JavaScript

By  on  

URLs can be tricky to work with because they can be more complicated than the traditional URL format you type in.  I was again reminded of this when I was parsing Webpack URLs when I saw this beauty:

webpack-internal:///../rbd/pnpm-volume/144384a5-85d9-4142-b9b9-168eea22eb97/node_modules/.registry.npmjs.org/fbjs/0.8.17/node_modules/fbjs/lib/isNode.js

I parsed the URL with new URL("....") but saw that the pathname included every leading slash:

///../rbd/pnpm-volume/144384a5-85d9-4142-b9b9-168eea22eb97/node_modules/.registry.npmjs.org/fbjs/0.8.17/node_modules/fbjs/lib/isNode.js


Since I wanted to display a sane pathname, I wanted to figure out how to remove/replace repeated characters with JavaScript.  It was actually easier than I thought it would be:

const prettyPath = urlObj.pathname.replace(/\/{2,}/g, "/");

// > /../rbd/pnpm-volume/144384a5-85d9-4142-b9b9-168eea22eb97/node_modules/.registry.npmjs.org/fbjs/0.8.17/node_modules/fbjs/lib/isNode.js

The {2,} part of the regular expression only allows for one of the repeated characters, and /g ensures that multiple instances within the string will have the repeat character removed.

Just when I thought I'd seen it all this Webpack URL surprised me.  Luckily a small regex let me show a pretty URL in page to the user!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Google Extension Effect with CSS or jQuery or MooTools JavaScript

    Both of the two great browser vendors, Google and Mozilla, have Extensions pages that utilize simple but classy animation effects to enhance the page. One of the extensions used by Google is a basic margin-top animation to switch between two panes: a graphic pane...

  • By
    DWRequest: MooTools 1.2 AJAX Listener & Message Display

    Though MooTools 1.2 is in its second beta stage, its basic syntax and theory changes have been hashed out. The JavaScript library continues to improve and become more flexible. Fellow DZone Zone Leader Boyan Kostadinov wrote a very useful article detailing how you can add a...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!