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);   
}