JavaScript String.format() method.

A while back I worked on a pretty heavy duty JavaScript interface that required, as is typical in any UI, a lot of string manipulation. I became tired of building strings with concatenation, they had a tendency to get unwieldy. I wrote this simple string formatting utility for building strings similiar to C#.

The best way to use it is to put it into an external JavaScript source file and reference it throughout the project.

Although the method has only one defined argument it will accept any number of arguments. If you provide more or less arguments than you define in your string they will not cause an error, they will be ignored.

String.format = function( text )

{

    //check if there are two arguments in the arguments list

    if ( arguments.length <= 1 )

    {

        //if there are not 2 or more arguments there's nothing to replace

        //just return the original text

        return text;

    }

    //decrement to move to the second argument in the array

    var tokenCount = arguments.length - 2;

    for( var token = 0; token <= tokenCount; token++ )

    {

        //iterate through the tokens and replace their placeholders from the original text in order

        text = text.replace( new RegExp( "\\{" + token + "\\}", "gi" ),

                                                arguments[ token + 1 ] );

    }

    return text;

};

You can test the method with these simple tests.

//simple tests

document.write( String.format( "no tokens<br />" ) );

document.write( String.format( "one token, no args ({0})<br />" ) );

document.write( String.format( "one token, one args ({0})<br />", "arg1" ) );

document.write( String.format( "one tokens, two args ({0})<br />", "arg1", "arg2" ) );

document.write( String.format( "two tokens, two args ({0},{1})<br />", "arg1", "arg2" ) );

document.write( String.format( "two tokens swapped, two args ({1},{0})<br />", "arg1", "arg2" ) );

document.write( String.format( "four tokens interwoven, two args ({0},{1},{0},{1})<br />", "arg1", "arg2" ) );