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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to show a smaller implementation that's more efficient.

I've seen several "one liners" in this thread already, and most of them either blow up when something that's not a string is passed in (regardless of how you view strict typing, js doesn't have it and this shouldn't happen), or are extremely slow comparatively (most of them creating and destroying an array every time they are called).

Plus this has 100% test coverage (even as trivial as it is, it still counts), and is "battle tested" (something like 2.5 million installs per month counts for something).

Sorry, but i'll stick to left-pad vs 20-seconds of thought one-liner.

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> Feel free to show a smaller implementation that's more efficient.

How's this:

  function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
    ch = (len -= str.length) <= 0 ? '' : !ch && ch !== 0 ? ' ' : String(ch);

    while (--len > 0) ch += ch[0];
 
    return ch + String(str);
  }

No local variables, less manipulation of the input string, the string grows at the tail which is more efficient, and the code is much shorter.

(With a bit of work you can use the longer ch string that is built to reduce the number of string appends even more by appending multiple characters at once. Although probably not worth it for this function.)

No offense, but that code is much more difficult to understand. If your goal is to minimize the amount of lines, then you succeeded. If the goal is to produce both correct and readable code, then there's room for improvement.

If you are talking about a module that everyone just includes and expects to work, then I'd imagine the goal would be a combination of correct and efficient, not readable.

> No offense, but that code is much more difficult to understand.

I strongly disagree. My code has no magic initializers (the -1 in the original) and a simple linear code path, with no branching. It's very easy to read and understand.

The ternary operator at the top is simply read from left to right, it's not complicated.

> If your goal is to minimize the amount of lines, then you succeeded.

My goal was to maximize efficiency. Often that means less lines, but that was not the overt goal. And in fact this version runs faster, and uses less memory.

> If the goal is to produce both correct and readable code, then there's room for improvement.

You think so?

Then now it's your turn - rewrite this (or the original) to make it as readable as possible. I think you will find that a: mine is more readable than the original, and b: you won't be able to (need to) change much except to lift the len initializer out of the ternary operator in the first line onto its own line.

I wasn't planning on passing a non-string to my function. The type-checking only needs to happen because this is a needlessly generic function

Okay, but then when you pass a string that's just `12` in and get `16` instead of ` 12` don't blame javascript...

I didn't intend to, although since I was going to prepend a string to the start that would be a rather surprising result

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