Little helpers: a tweet-sized JavaScript templating engine

JavaScript libraries don’t have to big and clunky to be useful. Often, less is more. I’m doing a lot of work with single-page apps and short-lived event sites and visualizers—often coming up with some helper code while doing it, because it’s faster to implement small things yourself then to search for existing solutions, with none of them really doing what you want.

An example? Templating. While there’s a gadzillion more or less awesome templating engines for JavaScript out there, in one case I needed something übersimple—and tried to fit it into a tweet (for no particular reason).

function t(s,d){
 for(var p in d)
   s=s.replace(new RegExp('{'+p+'}','g'), d[p]);
 return s;
}

Call it like this:

t("Hello {who}!", { who: "JavaScript" }); 
// "Hello JavaScript!"

t("Hello {who}! It's {time} ms since epoch.", { who: "JavaScript", time: Date.now }); 
// "Hello JavaScript! It's 1299680443046 ms since epoch."

If I’d need larger templates, I’d probably go with one of the engines that allows you to store HTML templates in <script> tags, but for my use case (just some messages) this worked beautifully.

Update Thanks to Daniel Herzog to point out that replace is automatically executing functions, which basically cut my code in half. Awesome.