Parsers Background

@lou.codes/parsers is a library of functional utils to strings, JSON and so on without throwing errors or relying in NaN, and instead just gives undefined if the parsing fails. This way any parsing error can be check the same way, or default valued with ??.

The JSON parser also is secure by default, omitting __proto__ properties.

Why

Parsing values from user input, APIs and other untrusted sources can be really tricky, because there are multiple ways to parse those and multiple values coming from them. This library idea is to standardize to undefined, and avoid null, NaN or try/catch blocks.

How

I built this library using TypeScript, with configurations from my shared configs. I made it ESM only as soon as Node started supporting ESM modules, and I made it tree-shakeable by using named exports.

The attempt util is key in this library, because it’s an abstraction of try/catch that tries to do whatever I want it to do, but if it throws an error, it catches that and returns undefined instead.

The other “key” util is parseInteger, which is a curried function used by all the number parsers such as parseBinary and parseDecimal.

Where

This library is used by parsing depending libraries (obviously), such as cron and predicates.