Trouble with 'Convert HTML Entities' challenge

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:
Hi All,

This is the challenge:
Convert the characters & , < , > , " (double quote), and ' (apostrophe), in a string to their corresponding HTML entities.

I am having trouble debugging this code. As far as I can tell I’ve wrote everything correctly but it doesnt work for the two specific instances in the logs at the bottom.

The hamburgers pizza taco one is apparently correct when I log it, but doesnt satisfy the requirements.

The <> returns &lt;> and I can’t figure out why.

Thanks (this is my first forum post, I’d gladly take suggestions on how best to format these questions in the future)

Your code so far


function convertHTML(str) {
  return str.replace(/</g, '&​lt;').replace(/&/g, '&amp;').replace(/>/g, '&gt;').replace(/"/g, '&quot;').replace(/'/g, '&apos;');
}

console.log(convertHTML("Hamburgers < Pizza < Tacos"));
console.log(convertHTML("<>"))

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:

2

This is the first thing you are doing, consider that that & in &lt; will also be converted with the next method

1 Like
3

You don’t need to use replace that many times. You’re basically running through the string each time you do it. Plus, it’s harder to visually see, vs creating a Map.

1 Like
4

hm ya. Unfortunately changing the order here does not change the output

5

I’m struggling to conceptualize how to do this.

return str.map((i) => i.replace( ))

Would I need to put all of those replace methods inside the map function?

6

So if you’re serious about becoming better at programming I highly recommend learning how to use MDN’s site.

If you scroll down and click syntax you’ll see this:

var newStr = str.replace(regexp|substr, newSubstr|function)

If you scroll further down within that section it describes what those variables are.

Notice how the last parameter there says “function”.

Which means you can do:
'kzollove & FCC'.replace(/&/, (char) => { console.log(char); });
The bold is regexp and function in documentation.

whenever javascript finds a match it passes that value to the function.
So with the example above,. characters kzollove[space] do nothing… but when it gets to & that value becomes char and now char is used in your function.

Now,.
If you did:

let myNewStr = 'kzollove loves FCC!'.replace(/[!]/, (char) => { 
    return char + '!!!' 
});

console.log(myNewStr); // kzollove and FCC!!!!

2 Likes
7

Sorry for the late response, but I really appreciate the big reply you left me. Good advice on MDN. I have been accessing it a little bit but it always strikes me as daunting and I usually navigate to easier to decipher sources. I will put in the time in the future.

Thanks for the advice on the alg. Perfect amount of a hint to get me to the finish line. I knew from the start I needed a way to selectively replace, but your demonstration of the replace method helped me get there finally.

**spoiler ** my final algorithm for anyone interested

function convertHTML(str) {
  let x = 
    {'&': '&amp;',
    '<': '&lt;',
    '>': '&gt;', 
    '\"': '&quot;',
    '\'': '&apos;'
    }

  return str.replace(/[&<>\"\']/g, char => { return x[char] })
}
2 Likes