utile

A drop-in replacement for util with some additional advantageous functions

Installation

Installing npm (node package manager)

  curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Installing utile

  [sudo] npm install utile

Motivation

Javascript is definitely a "batteries not included language" when compared to languages like Ruby or Python. Node.js has a simple utility library which exposes some basic (but important) functionality:

$ node
> var util = require('util');
> util.
(...)

util.debug                 util.error                 util.exec                  util.inherits              util.inspect
util.log                   util.p                     util.print                 util.pump                  util.puts

When one considers their own utility library, why ever bother requiring util again? That is the approach taken by this module. To compare:

$ node
> var utile = require('./lib')
> utile.
(...)

utile.async                 utile.capitalize            utile.clone                 utile.cpr                   utile.debug
utile.each                  utile.error                 utile.exec                  utile.inherits              utile.inspect
utile.log                   utile.mixin                 utile.mkdirp                utile.p                     utile.print
utile.pump                  utile.puts                  utile.randomString          utile.read                  utile.rimraf

As you can see all of the original methods from util are there, but there are several new methods specific to utile. A note about implementation: no node.js native modules are modified by utile, it simply copies those methods.

Methods

The utile modules exposes some simple utility methods:

• .each(obj, iterator): Iterate over the keys of an object.
• .mixin(target [source0, source1, ...]): Copies enumerable properties from source0 ... sourceN onto target and returns the resulting object.
• .clone(obj): Shallow clones the specified object.
• .capitalize(str): Capitalizes the specified str.
• .randomString(length): randomString returns a pseudo-random ASCII string (subset) the return value is a string of length ⌈bits/6⌉ of characters from the base64 alphabet.
• .filter(obj, test): return an object with the properties that test returns true on.

Packaged Dependencies

In addition to the methods that are built-in, utile includes a number of commonly used dependencies to reduce the number of includes in your package.json. These modules are not eagerly loaded to be respectful of startup time, but instead are lazy-loaded getters on the utile object

• .async: Async utilities for node and the browser
• .mkdirp: Recursively mkdir, like mkdir -p, but in node.js
• .rimraf: A rm -rf util for nodejs
• .cpr: Asynchronous recursive file copying with Node.js

Tests

All tests are written with vows and should be run with npm:

  $ npm test

Author: Nodejitsu Inc.

Contributors: Charlie Robbins, Dominic Tarr