Template Strings

[RayPS]

Can we use template strings like

"`firstName` `lastName` is `age` years old."

instead of using many quotes and concatenate operators like

firstName & " " & lastName & " is " & age & " years old."

[gregory]

following the javascript string interpolation would make more sense:

`${firstname} ${lastname} is ${age} years old.`

[markmelville]

Bumping. I'd love this feature. Backticks are used to escape property names that have irregular characters. It might be not be feasible to use them for templates.

[tmdoit-zz]

I did some SQL query generators and moved to template literals (later to mustache) because of hard to read and maintain the result.

[Nenzyz]

Very dirty hack ready with some small issues.

It converts expression `...` into string with concatenating expression(s) found, if regex /(\${[^}]+})+/ matches, meaning substitution pattern found ${...}. Directly the whole expression changed into string concatenation etc.

`some ${1 + 1} thing ${2 - 2}`

will be internally represented as

"some " & ( 1 + 1 ) & " thing " & ( 2 - 2 ) & ""`

Any jsonata expression can be placed as a placeholder ${...}.

Again this is very dirty.

In parser.js near comment // test for quoted names (backticks) after name = path.substring(position, end);

                    // TI parts - Special case for `template strings` of JavaScript
                    //   no nesting templated are allowed, an least for now
                    // TODO: this is a VERY dirty hack for syntactic sugar
                    // TODO: different quotes should be avoided used in between substitutions 
                    //    i.e. `some ‘asd’ ${…} "asdasd" ‘asdas’ ${…}` 
                    //    such expression will not be able to process since part between two substitutions is used
                    //    "some 'asd'" & ( ${…} ) & "asdasd" 'asdas' & ( ${…}` ) & ""
                    //    this part `"asdasd" 'asdas'` can't be quoted correctly 
                    if (name.match(/(\${[^}]+})+/) != undefined) {
                        var before_path = path.slice(0, position - 1);
                        var after_path = path.slice(end + 1);

                        var iterations = name.split(/(\${[^}]+})+/g);
                        var iter_out = [];
                        iterations.forEach(el => {
                            if (el.substring(0,2) == "${" && el.slice(-1) == "}") {
                                iter_out.push(`& ( ${el.slice(2, el.length - 1)} ) &`);
                            } else {
                                var qchar = 
                                    (el.indexOf('"') == -1) ||
                                    (el.indexOf('"') >= el.indexOf("'") && el.indexOf('"') != -1 && el.indexOf("'") != -1) || 
                                    (el.indexOf("'") != -1) 
                                    ? '"' : "'";
                                iter_out.push(`${qchar}${el}${qchar}`);
                            }
                        });
                        path = "".concat(before_path, `${iter_out.join("")}`, after_path);
                        length = path.length;
                        end = path.indexOf(iter_out[0][0], position); // looking for a quote that is first char in first element
                        name = path.substring(position, end);
                        position = end + 1;
                        return create('string', name);
                    }
                    position = end + 1;
                    return create('name', name);
                }

My fork of jsonata is not on GitHub :(

[natcl]

Bump also, this would be awesome !

[iain-b]

FWIW, me too!

[kevinmata92]

Bump, agree templating would be nice!