url-template

What is url-template?

The url-template npm package is a utility for expanding URLs that follow the URI Template specification as per RFC 6570. This package allows developers to programmatically build URLs with variable substitutions in a template format, making it easier to handle complex URL generation scenarios.

What are url-template's main functionalities?

URL Expansion

This feature allows for the expansion of URL templates with variables. The template is defined with placeholders, and the expand method replaces these placeholders with actual values provided in an object.

var urlTemplate = require('url-template');
var template = urlTemplate.parse('/{section}/{topic}{?orderby,direction}');
var url = template.expand({ section: 'blog', topic: 'npm-packages', orderby: 'date', direction: 'asc' });
console.log(url); // Outputs: /blog/npm-packages?orderby=date&direction=asc

Other packages similar to url-template

uri-templates

Similar to url-template, uri-templates also implements RFC 6570 URI Template specification. It provides a similar API for parsing and expanding URI templates but might differ in specific parsing capabilities or performance optimizations.

README

A JavaScript URI template implementation

This is a simple URI template implementation following the RFC 6570 URI Template specification. The implementation supports all levels defined in the specification and is extensively tested.

Installation

For use with Node.js you can install it through npm:

$ npm install url-template

If you want to use it in a browser, copy lib/url-template.js into your project and use the global urltemplate instance. Alternatively you can use Bower to install this package:

$ bower install url-template

Example

var template = require('url-template');

...

var emailUrl = template.parse('/{email}/{folder}/{id}');

// Returns '/user@domain/test/42'
emailUrl.expand({
  email: 'user@domain',
  folder: 'test',
  id: 42
});

A note on error handling and reporting

The RFC states that errors in the templates could optionally be handled and reported to the user. This implementation takes a slightly different approach in that it tries to do a best effort template expansion and leaves erroneous expressions in the returned URI instead of throwing errors. So for example, the incorrect expression {unclosed will return {unclosed as output. The leaves incorrect URLs to be handled by your URL library of choice.