Extraneous spaces not skipped

[vitaly-t]

Is the following an expected result or a bug?

ObjectPath.parse(`[123]['one two']`); //=> [ '123', 'one two' ]

ObjectPath.parse(`[ 123 ][ 'one two' ]`); //=> [ ' 123 ', " 'one two' " ]

I thought the result for the two inputs would be identical, i.e. the second should produce the same output as the first one, because the extra spaces carry no significance, and from JavaScript syntax point of view, the two inputs are the same thing.

I am inclined to think it is a bug, because if we encounter such path, let's say in HTML, we cannot just remove spaces from it, because 'one two' would incorrectly merge into 'onetwo' then.

[vitaly-t]

Looking more through the algorithm, I can see that it doesn't really validate the input properly, which means there is no point even trying. Instead, it should just assume the input is valid JavaScript, and then parse it accordingly.

If we assume the path is valid, then parsing it becomes significantly easier...

Here's the whole thing I just re-implemented:

export function parse(path: string): (string | number)[] {
    const res = [], reg = /\[\s*(\d+)|["']([^"']+)["']\s*]|[a-z_$0-9]+/gi;
    let a;
    while (a = reg.exec(path)) {
        res.push(a[1] ? parseInt(a[1]) : a[3] || a[2] || a[0]);
    }
    return res;
}

This in addition fixes the issue as per this subject, and plus detects and converts integer indexes.

test:

parse(`[123]['one two']`); //=> [ 123, 'one two' ]

parse(`[ 123 ][ 'one two' ]`); //=> [ 123, 'one two']

One minor omission - this regEx doesn't handle quotes inside quotes. But it can also be fixed, using this technique.

[vitaly-t]

After having tried to join those two things together, without success, I published a question about it.