03 February 2021 0 comments JavaScript
What do you think this code will print out?
function validateURL(url) {
if (url.includes("://")) {
const url = new URL(url);
return url.protocol === "https:";
} else {
return "dunno";
}
}
console.log(validateURL("http://www.peterbe.com"));
I'll give you a clue that isn't helpful,
▶ eslint --version
v7.19.0
▶ eslint code.js
▶ echo $?
0
OK, the answer is that it crashes:
▶ node code.js
/Users/peterbe/dev/JAVASCRIPT/catching_consts/code.js:3
const url = new URL(url);
^
ReferenceError: Cannot access 'url' before initialization
at validateURL (/Users/peterbe/dev/JAVASCRIPT/catching_consts/code.js:3:25)
at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/peterbe/dev/JAVASCRIPT/catching_consts/code.js:9:13)
...
▶ node --version
v15.2.1It's an honest and easy mistake to make. If the code was this:
function validateURL(url) {
const url = new URL(url);
return url.protocol === "https:";
}
// console.log(validateURL("http://www.peterbe.com"));
you'd get this error:
▶ node code2.js
/Users/peterbe/dev/JAVASCRIPT/catching_consts/code2.js:2
const url = new URL(url);
^
SyntaxError: Identifier 'url' has already been declaredwhich means node
refuses to even start it. But it can't with the original code because of the blocking scope that only happens in runtime.
Easiest solution
function validateURL(url) {
if (url.includes("://")) {
- const url = new URL(url);
+ const parsedURL = new URL(url);
- return url.protocol === "https:";
+ return parsedURL.protocol === "https:";
} else {
return "dunno";
}
}
console.log(validateURL("http://www.peterbe.com"));
Best solution
Switch to TypeScript.
▶ cat code.ts
function validateURL(url: string) {
if (url.includes('://')) {
const url = new URL(url);
return url.protocol === 'https:';
} else {
return "dunno";
}
}
console.log(validateURL('http://www.peterbe.com'));
▶ tsc --noEmit --lib es6,dom code.ts
code.ts:3:25 - error TS2448: Block-scoped variable 'url' used before its declaration.
3 const url = new URL(url);
~~~
code.ts:3:11
3 const url = new URL(url);
~~~
'url' is declared here.
Found 1 error.01 February 2021 0 comments React,
JavaScript
tl;dr; The useSearchParams hook from react-router is great as a hybrid state manager in React.
The wonderful react-router has a v6 release coming soon. At the time of writing, 6.0.0-beta.0 is the release to play with. It comes with a React hook called useSearchParams and it's fantastic. It's not a global state manager, but it can be used as one. It's not persistent, but it's semi-persistent in that state can be recovered/retained in browser refreshes.
Basically, instead of component state (e.g. React.useState()) you use:
import React from "react";
import { createSearchParams, useSearchParams } from "react-router-dom";
import "./styles.css";
export default function App() {
const [searchParams, setSearchParams] = useSearchParams();
const favoriteFruit = searchParams.get("fruit");
return (
<div className="App">
<h1>Favorite fruit</h1>
{favoriteFruit ? (
<p>
Your favorite fruit is <b>{favoriteFruit}</b>
</p>
) : (
<i>No favorite fruit selected yet.</i>
)}
{["🍒", "🍑", "🍎", "🍌"].map((fruit) => {
return (
<p key={fruit}>
<label htmlFor={`id_${fruit}`}>{fruit}</label>
<input
type="radio"
value={fruit}
checked={favoriteFruit === fruit}
onChange={(event) => {
setSearchParams(
createSearchParams({ fruit: event.target.value })
);
}}
/>
</p>
);
})}
</div>
);
}
See Codesandbox demo here
To get a feel for it, try the demo page in Codesandbox and note has it basically sets ?fruit=🍌 in the URL and if you refresh the page, it just continues as if the state had been persistent.
Basically, that's it. You never have a local component state but instead, you use the current URL as your store, and useSearchParams is your conduit for it. The advantages are:
- It's dead simple to use
- You get "shared state" across components without needing to manually inform them through prop drilling
- At any time, the current URL is a shareable snapshot of the state
The disadvantages are:
- It needs to be realistic to serialize it through the URLSearchParams web API
- The keys used need to be globally reserved for each distinct component that uses it
- You might not want the URL to change
That's all you need to know to get started. But let's dig into some more advanced examples, with some abstractions, to "workaround" the limitations.
To append or to reset
Suppose you have many different components, it's very likely that they don't really know or care about each other. Suppose, the current URL is /page?food=🍔 and if one component does: setSearchParams(createSearchParams({fruit: "🍑"})) what will happen is that the URL will "start over" and become /page?fruit=🍑. In other words, the food=🍔 was lost. Well, this might be a desired effect, but let's assume it's not, so we'll have to make it "append" instead. Here's one such solution:
function appendSearchParams(obj) {
const sp = createSearchParams(searchParams);
Object.entries(obj).forEach(([key, value]) => {
if (Array.isArray(value)) {
sp.delete(key);
value.forEach((v) => sp.append(key, v));
} else if (value === undefined) {
sp.delete(key);
} else {
sp.set(key, value);
}
});
return sp;
}
Now, you can do things like this:
onChange={(event) => {
setSearchParams(
- createSearchParams({ fruit: event.target.value })
+ appendSearchParams({ fruit: event.target.value })
);
}}
See Codesandbox demo here
Now, the two keys work independently of each other. It has a nice "just works feeling".
Note that this appendSearchParams() function implementation solves the case of arrays. You could now call it like this:
{/* Untested, but hopefully the point is demonstrated */}
<div>
<ul>
{(searchParams.getAll("languages") || []).map((language) => (
<li key={language}>{language}</li>
))}
</ul>
<button
type="button"
onClick={() => {
setSearchParams(
appendSearchParams({ languages: ["en-US", "sv-SE"] })
);
}}
>
Select 'both'
</button>
</div>
...and that will update the URL to become ?languages=en-US&languages=sv-SE.
Serialize it into links
The useSearchParams hook returns a callable setSearchParams() which is basically doing a redirect (uses the useNavigate() hook). But suppose you want to make a link that serializes a "future state". Here's a very basic example:
// Assumes 'import { Link } from "react-router-dom";'
<Link to={`?${appendSearchParams({fruit: "🍌"})}`}>Switch to 🍌</Link>
See Codesandbox demo here
Now, you get nice regular hyperlinks that uses can right-click and "Open in a new tab" and it'll just work.
Type conversion and protection
The above simple examples use strings and array of strings. But suppose you need to do more more advanced type conversions. For example: /tax-calculator?rate=3.14 where you might have something that needs to be deserialized and serialized as a floating point number. Basically, you have to wrap the deserializing in a more careful way. E.g.
function TaxYourImagination() {
const [searchParams, setSearchParams] = useSearchParams();
const taxRaw = searchParams.get("tax", DEFAULT_TAX_RATE);
let tax;
let taxError;
try {
tax = castAndCheck(taxRaw);
} catch (err) {
taxError = errl;
}
if (taxError) {
return (
<div className="error-alert">
The provided tax rate is invalid: <code>{taxError.toString()}</code>
</div>
);
}
return <DisplayTax value={tax} onUpdate={(newValue) => {
setSearchParams(
createSearchParams({ tax: newValue.toFixed(2) })
);
}}/>;
}
08 January 2021 2 comments Python
tl;dr; selectolax is best for stripping HTML down to plain text.
The problem is that I have 10,000+ HTML snippets that I need to index into Elasticsearch as plain text. (Before you ask, yes I know Elasticsearch has a html_strip text filter but it's not what I want/need to use in this context).
Turns out, stripping the HTML into plain text was actually quite expensive at that scale. So what's the most performant way?
PyQuery
from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
text = pq(html).text()
selectolax
from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
text = HTMLParser(html).text()
regular expression
import re
regex = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
text = clean_regex.sub('', html)
Results
I wrote a script that iterated through 10,000 files that contains HTML snippets. Note! The snippets aren't complete <html> documents (with a <head> and <body> etc) Just blobs of HTML. The average size is 10,314 bytes (5,138 bytes median).
pyquery
SUM: 18.61 seconds
MEAN: 1.8633 ms
MEDIAN: 1.0554 ms
selectolax
SUM: 3.08 seconds
MEAN: 0.3149 ms
MEDIAN: 0.1621 ms
regex
SUM: 1.64 seconds
MEAN: 0.1613 ms
MEDIAN: 0.0881 ms
I've run it a bunch of times. The results are pretty stable.
Point is: selectolax is ~7 times faster than PyQuery
Regex? Really?
No, I don't think I want to use that. It makes me nervous without even attempting to dig up some examples where it goes wrong. It might work just fine for the most basic blobs of HTML. Actually, if the HTML is <p>Foo & Bar</p>, I expect the plain text transformation should be Foo & Bar, not Foo & Bar.
More pressing, both PyQuery and selectolax
supports something very specific but important to my use case. I need to remove certain tags (and its content) before I proceed. For example:
<h4 class="warning">This should get stripped.</h4>
<p>Please keep.</p>
<div style="display: none">This should also get stripped.</div>
That can never be done with a regex.
Version 2.0
So my requirement will probably change but basically, I want to delete certain tags. E.g. <div class="warning"> and <div class="hidden"> and <div style="display: none">. So let's implement that:
PyQuery
from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
_display_none_regex = re.compile(r'display:\s*none')
doc = pq(html)
doc.remove('div.warning, div.hidden')
for div in doc('div[style]').items():
style_value = div.attr('style')
if _display_none_regex.search(style_value):
div.remove()
text = doc.text()
selectolax
from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
_display_none_regex = re.compile(r'display:\s*none')
tree = HTMLParser(html)
for tag in tree.css('div.warning, div.hidden'):
tag.decompose()
for tag in tree.css('div[style]'):
style_value = tag.attributes['style']
if style_value and _display_none_regex.search(style_value):
tag.decompose()
text = tree.body.text()
This actually works. When I now run the same benchmark for 10,000 of these are the new results:
pyquery
SUM: 21.70 seconds
MEAN: 2.1701 ms
MEDIAN: 1.3989 ms
selectolax
SUM: 3.59 seconds
MEAN: 0.3589 ms
MEDIAN: 0.2184 ms
regex
Skip
Again, selectolax beats PyQuery by a factor of ~6.
Conclusion
Regular expressions are fast but weak in power. Makes sense.
This selectolax is very impressive.
I got the inspiration from this blog post which sets out to do something very similar to what I'm doing.
I hope this helps someone. Thank you Artem Golubin of selectolax and @lexborisov for Modest which
selectolax is built upon.
21 December 2020 1 comment Python
I love git on the command line and I actually never use a GUI to navigate git branches. But sometimes, I need scripting to make abstractions that make life more convenient. What often happens is that I need to go back to the "main" branch. I write main in quotation marks because it's not always called main. Sometimes it's called master. And it's tedious to have to remember which one is the default.
So I wrote a script called Gcm:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess
def run(*args):
default_branch = get_default_branch()
current_branch = get_current_branch()
if default_branch != current_branch:
checkout_branch(default_branch)
else:
print(f"Already on {default_branch}")
return 1
def checkout_branch(branch_name):
subprocess.run(f"git checkout {branch_name}".split())
def get_default_branch():
res = subprocess.run(
"git config --worktree --get git-checkout-default.default-branch".split(),
check=False,
capture_output=True,
)
if res.returncode == 0:
return res.stdout.decode("utf-8").strip()
origin_name = "origin"
res = subprocess.run(
f"git remote show {origin_name}".split(),
check=True,
capture_output=True,
)
for line in res.stdout.decode("utf-8").splitlines():
if line.strip().startswith("HEAD branch:"):
default_branch = line.replace("HEAD branch:", "").strip()
subprocess.run(
f"git config --worktree git-checkout-default.default-branch "
f"{default_branch}".split(),
check=True,
)
return default_branch
raise NotImplementedError(f"No remote called {origin_name!r}")
def get_current_branch():
res = subprocess.run("git branch --show-current".split(), capture_output=True)
for line in res.stdout.decode("utf-8").splitlines():
return line.strip()
res = subprocess.run("git show -s --pretty=%d HEAD".split(), capture_output=True)
for line in res.stdout.decode("utf-8").splitlines():
return line.strip()
raise NotImplementedError("Don't know what to do!")
if __name__ == "__main__":
import sys
sys.exit(run(*sys.argv[1:]))
It ain't pretty or a spiffy one-liner, but it works. It assumes that the repo has a remote called origin which doesn't matter if it's the upstream or your fork. Put this script into a file called ~/bin/Gcm and run chmox +x ~/bin/Gcm.
Now, whenever I want to go back to the main branch I type Gcm and it takes me there.
It might seem silly, and it might not be for you, but I love it and use it many times per day. Perhaps by sharing this tip, it'll inspire someone else to set up something similar for themselves.
Why it's spelled with an uppercase G
I have a pattern (or rule?) that all scripts that I write myself are always capitalized like that. It avoids clashes with stuff I install with brew or other bash/zsh aliases.
For example:
ls -l ~/bin/RemoteVSCodePeterbecom.sh
ls -l ~/bin/Cleanupfiles
ls -l ~/bin/RandomString.py
UPDATE: July 2021
Jason @silverjam Mobarak on Twitter suggested an optimization. I've incorporated his suggestion into the original blog post above. See this twitter thread.
Essentially, it now uses git config --worktree to set and get the outcome of the default branch name so the next time it's needed it does not depend on network.
But watch out, if you, like me, change the default branch of some existing repos from master to main; then you'll need to run:
git config --worktree --unset git-checkout-default.default-branch.
15 December 2020 1 comment Node, JavaScript
I recently wrote a Google Firebase Cloud function that resizes images on-the-fly and after having published that I discovered that sharp is "better" than jimp. And by better I mean better performance.
To reach this conclusion I wrote a simple trick that loops over a bunch of .png and .jpg
files I had lying around and compare how long it took each implementation to do that. Here are the results:
Using jimp
▶ node index.js ~/Downloads
Sum size before: 41.1 MB (27 files)
...
Took: 28.278s
Sum size after: 337 KB
Using sharp
▶ node index.js ~/Downloads
Sum size before: 41.1 MB (27 files)
...
Took: 1.277s
Sum size after: 200 KB
The files are in the region of 100-500KB, a couple that are 1-3MB, and 1 that is 18MB.
So basically: 28 seconds for jimp and 1.3 seconds for sharp
Bonus, the code
Don't ridicule me for my benchmarking code. These are quick hacks. Let's focus on the point.
sharp
function f1(sourcePath, destination) {
return readFile(sourcePath).then((buffer) => {
console.log(sourcePath, "is", humanFileSize(buffer.length));
return sharp(sourcePath)
.rotate()
.resize(100)
.toBuffer()
.then((data) => {
const destPath = path.join(destination, path.basename(sourcePath));
return writeFile(destPath, data).then(() => {
return stat(destPath).then((s) => s.size);
});
});
});
}
jimp
function f2(sourcePath, destination) {
return readFile(sourcePath).then((buffer) => {
console.log(sourcePath, "is", humanFileSize(buffer.length));
return Jimp.read(sourcePath).then((img) => {
const destPath = path.join(destination, path.basename(sourcePath));
img.resize(100, Jimp.AUTO);
return img.writeAsync(destPath).then(() => {
return stat(destPath).then((s) => s.size);
});
});
});
}
I test them like this:
console.time("Took");
const res = await Promise.all(files.map((file) => f1(file, destination)));
console.timeEnd("Took");
And just to be absolutely sure, I run them separately so the whole process is dedicated to one implementation.
08 December 2020 0 comments Web development, That's Groce!, Node, JavaScript
UPDATE 2020-12-30
With sharp after you've loaded the image (sharp(contents)) make sure to add .rotate()
so it automatically rotates the image correctly based on EXIF data.
UPDATE 2020-12-13
I discovered that sharp is much better than jimp. It's order of maginitude faster. And it's actually what the Firebase Resize Images extension uses. Code updated below.
I have a Firebase app that uses the Firebase Cloud Storage to upload images. But now I need thumbnails. So I wrote a cloud function that can generate thumbnails on-the-fly.
There's a Firebase Extension called Resize Images
which is nicely done but I just don't like that strategy. At least not for my app. Firstly, I'm forced to pick the right size(s) for thumbnails and I can't really go back on that. If I pick 50x50, 1000x1000 as my sizes, and depend on that in the app, and then realize that I actually want it to be 150x150, 500x500 then I'm quite stuck.
Instead, I want to pick any thumbnail sizes dynamically. One option would be a third-party service like imgix, CloudImage, or Cloudinary but these are not free and besides, I'll need to figure out how to upload the images there. There are other Open Source options like picfit
which you install yourself but that's not an attractive option with its implicit complexity for a side-project. I want to stay in the Google Cloud. Another option would be this AppEngine function by Albert Chen which looks nice but then I need to figure out the access control between that and my Firebase Cloud Storage. Also, added complexity.
As part of your app initialization in Firebase, it automatically has access to the appropriate storage bucket. If I do:
const storageRef = storage.ref();
uploadTask = storageRef.child('images/photo.jpg').put(file, metadata);
...
...in the Firebase app, it means I can do:
admin
.storage()
.bucket()
.file('images/photo.jpg')
.download()
.then((downloadData) => {
const contents = downloadData[0];
...in my cloud function and it just works!
And to do the resizing I use Jimp
which is TypeScript aware and easy to use. Now, remember this isn't perfect or mature but it works. It solves my needs and perhaps it will solve your needs too. Or, at least it might be a good start for your application that you can build on. Here's the function (in functions/src/index.ts):
interface StorageErrorType extends Error {
code: number;
}
const codeToErrorMap: Map<number, string> = new Map();
codeToErrorMap.set(404, "not found");
codeToErrorMap.set(403, "forbidden");
codeToErrorMap.set(401, "unauthenticated");
export const downloadAndResize = functions
.runWith({ memory: "1GB" })
.https.onRequest(async (req, res) => {
const imagePath = req.query.image || "";
if (!imagePath) {
res.status(400).send("missing 'image'");
return;
}
if (typeof imagePath !== "string") {
res.status(400).send("can only be one 'image'");
return;
}
const widthString = req.query.width || "";
if (!widthString || typeof widthString !== "string") {
res.status(400).send("missing 'width' or not a single string");
return;
}
const extension = imagePath.toLowerCase().split(".").slice(-1)[0];
if (!["jpg", "png", "jpeg"].includes(extension)) {
res.status(400).send(`invalid extension (${extension})`);
return;
}
let width = 0;
try {
width = parseInt(widthString);
if (width < 0) {
throw new Error("too small");
}
if (width > 1000) {
throw new Error("too big");
}
} catch (error) {
res.status(400).send(`width invalid (${error.toString()}`);
return;
}
admin
.storage()
.bucket()
.file(imagePath)
.download()
.then((downloadData) => {
const contents = downloadData[0];
console.log(
`downloadAndResize (${JSON.stringify({
width,
imagePath,
})}) downloadData.length=${humanFileSize(contents.length)}\n`
);
const contentType = extension === "png" ? "image/png" : "image/jpeg";
sharp(contents)
.rotate()
.resize(width)
.toBuffer()
.then((buffer) => {
res.setHeader("content-type", contentType);
// TODO increase some day
res.setHeader("cache-control", `public,max-age=${60 * 60 * 24}`);
res.send(buffer);
})
.catch((error: Error) => {
console.error(`Error reading in with sharp: ${error.toString()}`);
res
.status(500)
.send(`Unable to read in image: ${error.toString()}`);
});
})
.catch((error: StorageErrorType) => {
if (error.code && codeToErrorMap.has(error.code)) {
res.status(error.code).send(codeToErrorMap.get(error.code));
} else {
res.status(500).send(error.message);
}
});
});
function humanFileSize(size: number): string {
if (size < 1024) return `${size} B`;
const i = Math.floor(Math.log(size) / Math.log(1024));
const num = size / Math.pow(1024, i);
const round = Math.round(num);
const numStr: string | number =
round < 10 ? num.toFixed(2) : round < 100 ? num.toFixed(1) : round;
return `${numStr} ${"KMGTPEZY"[i - 1]}B`;
}
Here's what a sample URL looks like.
I hope it helps!
I think the next thing for me to consider is to extend this so it uploads the thumbnail back and uses the getDownloadURL() of the created thumbnail as a redirect instead. It would be transparent to the app but saves on repeated views. That'd be a good optimization.
