Tagged: Clean Code

Understanding Regular Expressions
18
Mar
2021

Understanding Regular Expressions

it’s time to get over your fears of regular expressions(regex)! If you’re like me, you’ve heard of regex but have always been confused by the cryptic syntax. Fear not, because in the next 5 minutes, you’ll have a basic understanding of what’s going on and how to use RegEx to make your life easier!

So what are Regular Expressions ?

Basically, regular expressions are patterns that you can use to find matching patterns in strings. This could be useful for password validation, or checking if the formatting of input fields is correct, or perhaps you want to parse a phone number, etc…

How do you use them?

There are a couple ways of creating a regex, you can either use the literal version( which I prefer) or you can use the constructor option. The literal version looks like so:

const regEx = /hello/;

When making a regular expression literal, you place the pattern between two forward slashes. Above, we would be searching for the word ‘hello’.

Using the constructor would look something like this:

 const regEx = new RegExp('hello');

I’m not the biggest fan of this, so moving forward I will only be using the literal version.

Testing Methods

How do you test your regex anyways? JavaScript provides us a couple of methods that are compatible with regular expressions:

  • test()
  • exec()
  • match()
  • matchAll()
  • replace()
  • search()
  • split()

For my examples I will primarily be using test() and match(). Test is a RegExp method used to search a string and return either true or false if your pattern is found, and match is a string method that can use regex and returns the instances found in an array.

How to Match Strings

As you saw in my example above, I created the regex /hello/. This pattern would be useful for finding the first case sensitive instance of ‘hello’. What if you want to find every instance of ‘hello’, case insensitive? This is where ‘flags’ come in.

Flags act as modifiers to your regular expression. They go after the closing slash and there are five native flags in JavaScript!

  • i : This makes your search case-insensitive!
  • g : This flag tells your search to look for all matches, not just the first one.
  • m : Multiline mode
  • s : This enables “dotall” mode. It allows ‘.’ to match newlines
  • u : Enables full unicode support
  • y : sticky; it matches only from the index indicated by the lastIndex property of the regex in the target string.

So if we wanted to find every instance of ‘hello’ case insensitive, in the string “Hello heLLO hellO HELLO!”, we would do something like this:

let regex = /hello/gi;
let string = “Hello heLLO hellO HELLO!”;
string.match(regex);//returns [ 'Hello', 'heLLO', 'hellO', 'HELLO' ]

See that’s not so bad! Let’s look at another tool that’s very useful: character classes.

Character Classes

Character classes let you match a group of characters by placing them inside square brackets! This lets you find multiple matches with different characters. For example: if you wanted to find the words ‘big’, ‘bag’, ‘bog’, ‘bug’ in the string “The big bug crawled out of my bag and went into the bog.” you could use a simple regular expression to do so!

let string = “The big bug crawled out of my bag and went into the bog.”;let regex = /b[aiou]g/gi;
string.match(regex);//returns [ 'big', 'bug', 'bag', 'bog' ]

That’s pretty cool. You can also search for a range of characters inside of a character set using a hyphen ‘-’! For example, if I wanted to find every number in a string for some reason, I could do something like this:

let string = "I want 6 chocolates, 5 pop tarts, and 3 pumpkin pies please."let regex = /[0-9]/g;
string.match(regex);//returns [ '6', '5', '3' ]

You can do the above and so, so much more using Regular Expressions. You’ll find it’s basically like another language! This is just the tip of the iceberg, and I hope at least I’ve made regex a little less scary. There is so much more to regular expressions than I can cover here, but there are plenty of great resources to continue learning.

Happy Coding!

A Guide on How to Write a Clean Code
18
Mar
2021

A Guide on How to Write a Clean Code

In this article, I’m going to talk about writing clean code in general and then end up with some examples. As an Android developer having a clean code has always been challenging for me which needs lots of effort and that’s just coding and coding.

Rules We Should Follow

  1. Ignore duplication (imply DRY principle-Don’t Repeat Yourself)
  2. Minimize entities, classes, and functions (avoid repetition)
  3. It should be readable and simple
  4. Be testable as it makes your code flexible and maintainable
  5. Follow SOLIDprinciples

S = Single-responsibility principle: A class should only have one purpose.

O = Open-closed principleA class should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

L = Liskov substitution principleAbstraction should be able to provide all needs of child class.

I = Interface segregation principleSmall interface is better than big one.

D = Dependency Inversion Principle: A class should depend on abstraction, not implementation.

6. Be careful with dependencies

As many as possible try to have one-directional dependency. When dependency goes in multiple directions, things get much more complicated which makes hard to update and change.

7. Don’t hardcode

Define constant or use variables instead of hardcoding the values which will not only help readability but also make it easy to change if it is being used at multiple places.

Now let’s start writing Clean Code 🚀 …

Valid Names

Naming is one of the hardest parts of programming and may take time to choose, but it is a strong way to convey your code’s intent to other developers who read them in the future which must show the purpose of that class, function, or variable and even tell what is going to do. Don’t append prefixes or type information. I always have a checklist in my mind as listed below which assures me that a name has been chosen well:

  • Are the variables named according to the convention (camelCase, PascalCase, etc)?.
  • Does the name have an appropriate length to ensure that no one will be confused by it?.
  • Are the name of variables clear about what they hold?.
  • Are the names meaningful, searchable, and easy to pronounce?.

Class names should not only be names (not verbs) but also should have the PascalCase convention. On the other hand, method names should be verbs or phrase verbs and follow the camelCase convention. The same rules apply to variable names.

Functions and Methods

Following S from SOLID principles, let functions and methods perform only one task which should be small. If the function arguments are too many, you should review your code and maybe pack them into an object or divide that task between some other functions. Prefer possible exceptions to return error codes and extract error handling try catch into their own function.

Comments

We should use comments only when it is necessary, not to explain bad code. Writing lengthy comments will not help us in changing our code into a clean one. If the code is bad, we should solve it by improving the code, not by adding instructions on how to use it, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use comments at all, sometimes it is important such as dealing with third party APIs where you need to explain some behavior.

Code Appearance

It might look unimportant at first glance, but it is of high importance to write your code with a well-organized format which makes it readable such as:

  • Do not write everything in a single line. Give proper whitespace, indentation, or line breaks in your code.

Indentation styles assist in identifying control flow and blocks of code. In some programming languages, indentation is used to delimit logical blocks of code; correct indentation in these cases is more than a matter of style. In other languages, indentation and white space do not affect function, although logical and consistent indentation makes code more readable. (Inspired by WIKIPEDIA)

  • Instance variables should be declared at the top of the class.
  • If functions are calling each other (dependent functions) they should be close while putting the caller at first.
  • It is often helpful to align similar elements vertically, to make typo-generated bugs more obvious.

Tests

The importance of Test code is equal to producing the code and of course, while writing tests you might find some bugs. However, it can sometimes be quite difficult to write a good test for a particular piece of code which is a result of a badly designed and untestable code. Testing is almost like coding for the second time so follow all the previous rules for writing a good test as well which should be as per below :

  • One assert and single concept per test
  • Easy to write and readable (simplicity)
  • Fast
  • Independent

To conclude, I hope this article could be helpful to write a better code although it is important to keep practicing and learning in this field 😃 …