New day and new Dev Advent Calendar 2021 puzzle to solve. Santa’s elves got a taste for coffee and decided to take the plunge: they want to jump into the world of food delivery. First they have to fix the coffee shop site by adding an API capable of managing orders.
The puzzle: Elf Coffee Shop API 🧝🥤
Today’s puzzle is a little more difficult than the previous ones. But it can be easily broken down into two different sub-problems. The first is a simple problem of adding properties to a javascript object. The second instead requires playing with regular expressions. And in my opinion it’s also the funniest part. But let’s go in order and start from the beginning.
I use themap() method to iterate through each menu item and simply add the missing properties. Now all that remains is to fix the slugify function.
How to get a “slugified” version of a text
I was confused. It is a problem that I have never asked myself. But I think it is a frequent situation. I like to face new problems, even if they are new only to me. However, in the text of the puzzle there is a hint: Remove accents/diacritics in a string in JavaScript.
A world opened up for me, I didn’t know it was possible to use something called Unicode property escapes to make it easier to create regular expressions. Starting from here, I followed the requests step by step.
To make each character lowercase I obviously used the String.prototype.toLowerCase() method: text.toLowerCase().
To replace all the weird letters (including accented ones) I used this code: text.normalize("NFD").replace(/\p{Diacritic}/gu, ""). However, this does not solve the problem of emojis in the menu. Elves love emojis. One solution might be to use something like replace(/\p{Emoji}/gu, "-". It works, but is redundant with the next request.
In fact, to replace all alphanumeric characters (including emojis) I can use the regex .replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\s-]/gu, " "). I replace everything with spaces, not directly with dashes (-). Why? Because in this way I can directly use trim() to eliminate the empty spaces at the beginning and at the end of the string.
The next step is to replace all spaces with dashes. I can use .replace(/\s+/gu, "-") to turn each sequence of spaces into a single dash.
I put it all together and I get the slugify function:
Well, that’s it for today. I am curious to discover the puzzle of tomorrow.
