javascript extract parts of a sentence

Question

Hi I'm not that experienced in JavaScript, and I'm trying to parse commands given as full sentences. It has to be able to match the sentence to a function that will answer, and select sections that it will pass as arguments. I know that's not too clear so here's an example:

sentnce = "Show me a gift of a car" 

commands = {
   gif: {
     pattern: "*gif of a [target]*" 
     action: gifMe(target)

This scenario should result in the call gifMe("a car") or even better, gimme could be called with a object containing all of the arguments specified, there may be more than just target. I have no idea how to go about coding this or searching for a method to do this. Thanks in advance.

It's not relevant (I think) but I'm using jquery and Coffeescript.

Answer 1

I think this is the code you are looking for. See the comment in the code for some more information about how it works.

 var sentence = "Show me a gift of a car"; // specify commands var commands = { gif: { pattern: /gift of a (.*).?/, action: call } // you can add more commands here } // iterate over all commands for(var key in commands) { // get settings for command var settings = commands[key]; // apply command regex to sentence var result = sentence.match( settings.pattern ); // if there is a match trigger the action with the word as argument if( result && result.length > 1 ) settings.action.call(this, result[1]); } function call(value) { alert(value); }