Using ES6 template strings to generate unique strings

7 years ago

The following technique is something that I found template strings in ES6 to be quite useful for. I needed to generate XML chunks (as a string) where each node had a unique ID every time the XML was generated.

Most examples of template strings I see around the web just use simple variables inside template strings. I found that you can also use functions that return a value, making the string even more dynamic.

I ended up writing a function that creates the string and inserts unique IDs in specific locations every time the function is called:

const generateID = () => {
  // ... some code to generate and return an ID
}

const getUniqueString = () => {
  return `id=${generateID()}`
}

getUniqueString(); // "id=dJsdnUSD"
getUniqueString(); // "id=5nd9gHfs"
getUniqueString(); // "id=vn9s8fFQ"

You can place ${generateID()} any number of times in the template string and in each location a unique ID will be inserted.

Now I can call getStringTemplate() and get a unique chunk of XML every time.