JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#1

Post by mvrekic » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 12:02 AM UTC

If you are familiar with Django you are familiar with a nice set of template tags called "humanize". In essence it turns data such as "13 April 2012" into "2 days ago" or "1000000000" into "1.0 billion". JS Humanizer is a jQuery counterpart to the Django humanize template tags we wrote and thought that others might find it useful too.

JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)
github.com

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#2

Post by callumjones » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 1:02 AM UTC

Is it possible to have these in a stand alone library/namespace without the need for bringing the whole of jQuery with it? Not everyone uses jQuery in their JS application and it certainly would aid those who perform server-side JS.

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#3

Post by Groxx » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 1:31 AM UTC

callumjones wrote: post #2

Is it possible to have these in a stand alone library/namespace without the need for bringing the whole of jQuery with it? Not everyone uses jQuery in their JS application and it certainly would aid those who perform server-side JS.

IMO it's especially heinous because I didn't see a single piece of jQuery use in the code (I may have missed it, though). All they seem to be requiring jQuery for is to add to the $ namespace.

That pedantry aside, it seems like a decent enough chunk of code, and it's very easy to read. More libraries should be this clean.

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#4

Post by TamDenholm » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 2:14 AM UTC

callumjones wrote: post #2

Is it possible to have these in a stand alone library/namespace without the need for bringing the whole of jQuery with it? Not everyone uses jQuery in their JS application and it certainly would aid those who perform server-side JS.

This is perhaps an inelegant solution but i've found it useful sometimes, you can get standalone functions of most of these by using a JS port of PHP functions called phpjs (phpjs.org), while i understand PHP is as cool as toe fungus on HN right now, its a solution.

EDIT: Actually having now looked at the code, it seems a lot of it is specifically using the phpjs library.

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#5

Post by chetan51 » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 2:50 AM UTC

callumjones wrote: post #2

Is it possible to have these in a stand alone library/namespace without the need for bringing the whole of jQuery with it? Not everyone uses jQuery in their JS application and it certainly would aid those who perform server-side JS.

I've removed the jQuery dependency and submitted a pull request (https://github.com/milanvrekic/JS-humanize/pull/1).

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#6

Post by chris_wot » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 2:55 AM UTC

This might need some internationalization support...

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#7

Post by mvrekic » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 4:13 AM UTC

callumjones wrote: post #2

Is it possible to have these in a stand alone library/namespace without the need for bringing the whole of jQuery with it? Not everyone uses jQuery in their JS application and it certainly would aid those who perform server-side JS.

jQuery bit was originally intended to make it compatible with require.js loading; chetan51, Groxx - thanks for pointing it out. We removed that bit but we missed the dependancy, removed now thanks to chetan51

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#8

Post by whalesalad » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 4:13 AM UTC

This is great! I love how it aligns with the Django templating system as well =) Although I do agree that this might be better off a something that is framework independent. A while ago I posted an example on Forrst of how you might write a simple and pure-js shorten function: https://forrst.com/posts/JavaScript_Shorten_Function-1up

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#9

Post by sirn » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 5:16 AM UTC

Nice idea, but seems to lack of any input escaping.

    => Humanize.truncatechars("alert('yo');", 30)
       "alert('yo');"

    => Humanize.linebreaks("alert('yo');")
       "alert('yo');"

Bug filed.

Re: JS Humanize (Give data a human touch)

#10

Post by pferreir » Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 5:18 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #6

This might need some internationalization support...

I totally agree. i.e. plural should be handled by i18n libraries. Same thing for the thousands separator, different locales use different separators/styles.