Assume we have a string date in yyyy-mm-dd format (year-month-day) like so "2021-04-27"
If we were to apply regex on it to extract year/month/day from it :
const d = "2021-04-27";
const r = /(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})/;
const e = r.exec(d);
console.log(e); // [..., '2021', '04', '27', ... ]
We get a jumble of data back in an array, with our matches somewhere in between. Is there a better way? Why yes, there is :
const d = "2021-04-27";
const r = /(?<year>\d{4})-(?<month>\d{2})-(?<day>\d{2})/;
const e = r.exec(d);
console.log(e.groups); // { year: '2021', month: '04', day: '27' }
Whoa! Not only did our code get more readable, but our output is precise. And it is all built-in!
What exactly did we do? Well, we simply added "descriptions" to our regex groups:
const e_before = /(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})/;
const e_after = /(?<year>\d{4})-(?<month>\d{2})-(?<day>\d{2})/;
// (\d{4}) => (?<year>\d{4})
// ?<desc> inside () group
I haven't made many blog post recently, been working on Grand Simulation the whole time.
But this tip was much too useful to not share, so here we are.
That's all folks!
Due credits :