String.prototype.replaceLast

ECMAScript proposal for String.prototype.replaceLast, i.e. .replaceLast() method on string.

Status

Author: Kazi Tajnur Islam

Stage: undefined

Motivation

Replacing a sub-string in a string is a very common programming pattern.

The proposal has a major concerns: Semantical. Which means clearly representing the operation i want.

And with the changes. It's may useful in some performance-sensitive scenarios.

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ECMAScript currently supports String.prototype.replace to replace the first instance of a sub-string/pattern from a string. However, there is no way to replace the last instance of a substring in a string.

Currently one of the most common way of achieving this is to use a regex:

function replaceLastSubstring(string, substring, replacement) {
  const regex = new RegExp(`(${substring})(?!.*${substring})`); 
  return string.replace(regex, replacement);
}

This approach has the downsides, the regular expression itself can be slightly more complex to understand and debug. Performance might be slightly slower due to the regex engine's overhead. If the substring contains special characters that have meaning within regular expressions (e.g., ., *, +, ?, $, ^, etc.), the regex needs to be properly escaped to avoid unexpected behaviour.

An alternate solution is to combine .lastIndexOf() with .substring():

function replaceLastSubstring(string, substring, replacement) {
  const lastIndex = string.lastIndexOf(substring);

  if (lastIndex !== -1) {
    const firstPart = string.substring(0, lastIndex);
    const lastPart = string.substring(lastIndex + substring.length);
    return firstPart + replacement + lastPart;
  }

  return string; 
}

The code involves string manipulation (concatenation and substring extraction), which can be less concise than using a single replaceLast() method.

Example usage:

const testString = 'aabca';
const replacedString = replaceLastSubstring(testString, 'a', '_');
console.log(replacedString);

// Output: aabc_

Proposed solution

I propose the addition of a new method to the String prototype - replaceLast. This would give developers a straight-forward way to accomplish this common, basic operation.

const testString = 'aabca';
const replacedString = testString.replaceLast('a', '_');

This would behave the same as String.prototype.replace but would iterate from the last to the first.

High-level API

The proposed signature is the same as the existing String.prototype.replace method:

String.prototype.replaceLast(searchValue, replaceValue)

FAQ

What are the main benefits?

A simplified API for this common use-case that does not require RegExp knowledge. Possibly improved optimization potential on the VM side.

What about adding a direction parameter to the replace instead?

I thought about this way first, i.e. String.prototype.replace(searchValue, replaceValue, fromLast) - the default value of the fromLast will be false. This can be an awkward interface because ECMAScript already have similar interface like replaceLast, e.g. Array.prototype.findLast, which clearly defines it's operation by the name.