objectifier

Objectifier npm

Objectifier is a format-agnostic translator from a string to a javascript object.

It's a fairly thin wrapper around JSON.parse, xml2js.parseString, and qs.parse. We gain 3 main benefits from this wrapper:

• It allows us to use a single interface to parse incoming data into easily digestible javascript objects.
• It allows us to not care about the actual format of incoming data, though if specific formats are malformed then you won't get the data structure you expect, it just won't cause an error
• It allows us to use simple (naive) asynchronous processing of data.

Installation

$ npm install objectifier

Usage

var objectify = require('objectifier').objectify;

objectify('{ "key": "val", "foo": "bar" }', function(err, result) {
	// result:
	// {
	//	key: 'val',
	//	foo: 'bar'
	// }
});

objectify('<root><key foo="bar">val</key></root>', function(err, result) {
	// the result form is dictated by the standard workings of xml2js, currently we can't feed in any options
	// result:
	// {
	//	key: [
	//		{
	//			$: {foo: 'bar'},
	//			_: 'val'
	//		}
	//	]
	// }
});

objectify('key[]=val&key[]=bar', function(err, result) {
	// result:
	// {
	//	key: [
	//		'val',
	//		'bar'
	//	]
	// }
});

It can also be called in a synchronous context:

var jsonresult = objectify('{ "key": "val", "foo": "bar" }');
var xmlresult = objectify('<root><key foo="bar">val</key></root>');
var qstringresult = objectify('key[]=val&key[]=bar');

... it's important to note that as of now (version 0.1.0), the asynchronous method for all formats is very naive. It will not do chunked processing, it will simply delay processing the callback to the next tick. For most cases, the data will be small enough that this wouldn't matter, and even doing it synchronously is probably OK, but this could still cause issues on extremely large pieces of data.

Error checking

If you want to catch and handle errors, e.g. you expect your data in a particular format, then you can pass that format in to objectify and if it fails to parse in that format, then it will pass back an appropriate error message.

objectify('key=val&foo=bar', 'json', function(err, result) {
	// err indicates a failure to parse
	// result is empty
});

Stringify Usage

var stringify = require('objectifier').stringify;

stringify({ key: "val", foo: "bar" }, 'json', function(err, result) {
	// result:
	// '{"key":"val","foo":"bar"}'
});

All format types supported in objectify are supported in stringify, but these methods aren't guaranteed to be completely complimentary, input == stringify(objectify(input)) is not guaranteed to be true, but it's close enough for most uses.

What Else?

To Do: Electric Boogaloo

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2013 Jason Shinn

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.