Using ES6 template strings to generate unique strings

3 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:

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

const getStringTemplate = () => {
  return `<element uid="${generateID()}">
            <child uid="${generateID()}"></child>
          </element>`
}

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.