Blindsignals

I've been coding web pages and applications for quite a few years using quite a few different languages. When I learn something so basic and fundamental I often wonder how much of a noob I really am, and then how many other developers are in my same shoes.

The problem I had was converting HTML character codes such as & # 35 ( apostrophe ) to its ascii equivalent. I've done this many times before, but have always been too lazy to find a different method. After searching through various blogs for a solution I finally came across a beauty.

A basic explanation of the code goes a little something like this; now this is a story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down, and I liked to take a minute just sit right there, I'll tell ya how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air *record scratch*, err no wait.

Back on track, this function call does a couple of different things; first we are will search the entire string for every instance of our matches, and secondly we try to make our two matches ( yes two! ). The first match for our regular expression is looking for "&#"; this is our entry point into the search and should nab us every instance of those dang character codes. The second part of our match is the (\d+) sub expression, this is really what we are after and will give us the correct end result.

Once our expression has found a good match we will pass it to our callback function.

The first thing you should notice are the m and n parameters that are being passed, these are tied directly to the matches and follow the order they were matched in, or in other words m = "&#", and n = [ our numerical match ]. These could really be variable name you wish, I stuck with the original example because that's how I rock out.

On the inside of our function we simply ignore the m parameter as we are only interested in the digits baby. We pass the n parameter to our Javascript function and BAM, straight up ascii conversion, what, WHAT.

As always, hope this helps someone :]