Landmark Utils

A useful library of utilities for node.js used by Landmark and you!

It provides additional functionality for manipulating and converting various types of data, including converting strings between various forms, and lightweight html ← → text conversion.

Usage

npm install landmark-utils --save

... then ...

var utils = require('landmark-utils');
console.log(utils.isObject({})); // true!

Bundled with Landmark

If you're using Landmark, it exposes this library as .utils.

var landmark = require('landmark-serve'),
	utils = landmark.utils;

Test utilities

• isFunction(arg) - determines if arg is a function
• isObject(arg) - determines if arg is an object
• isValidObjectId(arg) - determines if arg looks like a valid MongoDB ObjectId
• isArray(arg) - determines if arg is an array
• isDate(arg) - determines if arg is a date
• isString(arg) - determines if arg is a string
• isNumber(arg) - determines if arg is a number
• isEmail(arg) - make sure arg looks like a valid email address
  • Uses a regular expression to check, so may cause false-negatives in extremely rare cases. See http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html

Option utilities

• options(defaults, options) - copies and merges options into the defaults
• optionsMap(arr, property, clone) - creates a map of options
  • Turns an array of objects into an object of objects, with each object under the value of property
  • Will shallow-clone the objects when clone is true (c/o underscore.clone)

Function utilities

• bindMethods(obj, scope) - recursively binds method properties of obj to scope and returns a new object containing the bound methods.

Random utilities

• randomString(len, chars) - Generates a 'random' string of characters to the specified length (uses Math.random).
  • len can be an array of [min, max] length to generate
  • chars is a string of characters to include, defaults to 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXTZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Conversion utilities

• number(arg) - converts a string to a number, accepting human-friendly input
  • e.g. 1,432 » 1432, $1432 » 1432, 2.5 » 2.5
• escapeRegExp(str) - escapes a string to be safely converted to a regular expression
• escapeString(str) - escapes a string to be safely used as a Javascript string literal
• stripDiacritics(str) - stips accented characters from a string, replacing them with their simple equivalents
• transliterate(str) - transliterates Russian and Ukrainian words from cyrillic to latin
• singular(str) - converts a string to its singular form
• plural(count, singular, plural) - displays the singular or plural of a string based on a number or number of items in an array.
  • Replaces * in the string with the number
  • Will automatically convert singular to plural when plural is not provided
  • When only given one argument, will return the plural form of a string
  • e.g.
    • plural(1, '* thing') » '1 thing'
    • plural(2, '* thing') » '2 things'
    • plural([1,2], 'single', 'couple') » 'couple'
    • plural('friend') » 'friends'
• upcase(str) - converts the first letter in a string to Uppercase
• downcase(str) - converts the first letter in a string to lowercase
• titlecase(str) - converts a string to Title Case
• camelcase(str, lowercase) - converts a string to camelCase
  • The lowercase argument causes the first letter to be lowercase, and default to true.
• decodeHTMLEntities(str) - decodes html entities in a string
• encodeHTMLEntities(str) - encodes html entities in a string
• textToHTML(str) - lightweight conversion of text to HTML (line breaks to <br>)
• htmlToText(str) - lightweight conversion to HTML to text
  • Really only useful when you need a lightweight way to remove html from a string before cropping it, so you don't end up with partial tags or an invalid DOM structure.
  • It will convert br, p, div, li, td, th tags to single line-breaks. All other tags are stripped.
  • Multiple line breaks are then compressed to a single line break, and leading / trailing white space is stripped.
  • For a more sophisticated use-case, you should check out the to-markdown and html-to-text packages on npm.
• cropString(str, length, append, preserveWords) - crops a string to the specified length
  • You can optionally provide a string to append (only appended if the original string was longer than the specified length).
  • If preserveWords is true, the length is extended to the end of the last word that would have been cropped.
• cropHTMLString(str, length, append, preserveWords) - crops an HTML string safely by converting it to text, cropping it, then converting it back to HTML
• slug(str, separator) - generates a slug from a string. Word breaks are hyphenated.
  • separator defaults to '-'
• keyToLabel(str) - converts a key to a label
  • e.g. keyToLabel('myKey') » My Key
• keyToPath(str, plural) - converts a key to a path
  • Like slug(keyToLabel(str)) but will optionally converts the last word to a plural.
  • e.g. keyToPath('someThing', true) » some-things
• keyToProperty(str, plural) - Converts a key to a property.
  • Like keyToPath but converts to headlessCamelCase instead of dash-separated
• calculateDistance(point1 [lat, lng], point2 [lat, lng]) - Returns the distance between two [lat,lng] points in radians
• kmBetween - Returns the distance between two [lat,lng] points in kilometers
• milesBetween - Returns the distance between two [lat,lng] points in miles

Credits

Uses the excellent underscore library, see http://underscorejs.org or npm info underscore

Uses the inflect library for singular / plural conversion, see https://github.com/pksunkara/inflect or npm info i

Some utils are borrowed from / inspired by mongoose/utils.js, see https://github.com/LearnBoost/mongoose

HTML Entity encode / decode is based on code in node-html-to-text, see https://github.com/werk85/node-html-to-text

The transliteration code is based on https://www.npmjs.org/package/transliteration.cyr