446252 - Borrow and enhance String Methods from .Net to JavaScript

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Biju]

Per bug 305064 comment #18
> > 5.
> > There also other useful methods
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.string_members.aspx
> > like StartsWith/EndsWith, IndexOfAny, 
> > PadLeft/PadRight (or better PadStart/PadEnd/PadCenter)
> 
> bug 76946 talks about StartsWith/EndsWith. As for the others, 
> you can file bugs them.

There are a list of nice String Methods in .Net 
  (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.string_members.aspx)
which we may borrow and enhance to use in JavaScript 

eg:-
1. PadLeft/PadRight (or better PadStart/PadEnd/PadCenter)
   - PadLeft is something I used for years to generate things like 
     bill#, product#, contract# etc. to get '0' padded number as in
     'PO000454', 'INV09854', 'KIT-0067-00378' etc    

2. Compare(String, String, StringComparison) /
   Equals(String, StringComparison)
    - it will be nice if we can compare two strings by giving 
      ignore case rules or the by the name from Java equalsIgnoreCase 
      http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html

3. IndexOfAny, LastIndexOfAny 
   - We have indexOf and lastIndexOf of in JavaScript
     but many times we will be interested in looking for first occurrence 
     of a list of "NEEDLES in haystack" rather than one string in haystack
     also it may be good if we can IGNORE CASE  like above as needed.

Comment 1

[Lars Gunther]

Why borrow from .NET only. There are many very useful string functions in lets say PHP: http://se.php.net/manual/en/ref.strings.php

Personally I use quit a few of them, and make use of a library of JS implementations of PHP functions. Eg. levenshtein is great to check if someone has altered the suggested text in a form field "enough".

Comment 2

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

There are many, many libraries to imitate. I don't have anything against the .NET ones _per se_.

I'm not in favor of native methods where scripted ones would do. Unnecessary attack surface, increasingly bogus performance reasoning (trace-tree JIT coming), code footprint micro-bloat (it wasn't the last cookie I ate that made me fat).

It would be better to look at JS ("Ajax") libraries that are populare today, and intersect their string method sets. Anyone up for that?

/be

Comment 3

[:Benjamin Peterson]

New methods need to come from the spec.