Parse (string) Function Call and Parameters in Javascript

Question

Suppose I have two links:

<a href="#" onclick="myFunction();"></a>
<a href="#" onclick="myFunction(1, 2, 'string');"></a>

My goal is to parse the myFunction call and get an array of the parameters. So from the first link I would want to get [] and from the second link I would want to get [1, 2, 'string'] .

I already know how to get the onclick attribute into a string (we are using jQuery here), so that doesn't need to be part of the answer.

Basically:

var myCall="myFunction(1, 2, 'string')";
parseFunctionString(myCall); //[1, 2, 'string']

Define parseFunctionString . I am imagining this would msot easily be done with some sort of regex.

Answer 1

You can do this literally with the arguments keyword, within a function. For example:

function foo() {
    alert(arguments[0]);
}
foo('bar');

that will alert 'bar' , since that's the first argument to the function. You can use the arguments keyword just like an array, but it won't have built-in methods like arrays do, so it won't have things like .sort() . More info can be found on MDN .