In JavaScript, regular expressions are also objects. When it'll reach stage 4 it will be soon ratified as part of the ECMAScript language (some of you know 'JavaScript' is copyrighted by Oracle). The implementation of pattern matching into JavaScript greatly aids in the processing of data for the Internet. Regular expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. But there is a proposal (currently at stage 1 of the process) that aims to introduce pattern matching in JavaScript.

Let's see what's the situation there.Īnd just as predicted, JavaScript doesn't have native pattern matching. But it turns out most dynamically typed languages do not have native pattern matching.Īnd JavaScript is perhaps the most common dynamically typed language. The biggest is that switch is an equality test on a single value, while pattern matching as proposed allows matching on multiple properties of an object, as well as conditional clauses.

This technique is useful per se, but particularly in dynamically typed languages, as they can't easily discriminate against class names if we're dealing with generic structures. zdragnar on Ap From looking at the proposal, there are substantial differences. Pattern matching is a pretty common action performed on entities in order to check if they follow some pattern or not.įor example, an object representing an animal could have a wings property or not, and thanks to its mere presence (out a value greater than 0) we can know which of them are birds or other flying critters.

Javascript pattern matching