As you know, JavaScript is the top programming language in the world, the language of the web, of mobile hybrid apps (like PhoneGap or Appcelerator), of the server side (like NodeJS or Wakanda) and has many other implementations. It’s also the starting point for many new developers to the world of programming, as it can be used to display a simple alert in the web browser but also to control a robot (using nodebot, or nodruino). The developers who master JavaScript and write organized and performant code have become the most sought after in the job market.

In this article, I’ll share a set of JavaScript tips, tricks and best practices that should be known by all JavaScript developers regardless of their browser/engine or the SSJS (Server Side JavaScript) interpreter.

Don’t forget “var” keyword when assigning a variable’s value for the first time.

Assignment to an undeclared variable automatically results in a global variable being created. Avoid global variables.

Use “===” instead of “==”

The == (or !=) operator performs an automatic type conversion if needed. The === (or !==) operator will not perform any conversion. It compares the value and the type, which could be considered faster than ==

[10] === 10    // is false

[10]  == 10    // is true

'10' == 10     // is true

'10' === 10    // is false

 []   == 0     // is true

 [] ===  0     // is false

 '' == false   // is true but true == "a" is false

 '' ===   false // is false 

undefined, null, 0, false, NaN, '' (empty string) are all falsy.

Use Semicolons for line termination

The use of semi-colons for line termination is a good practice. You won’t be warned if you forget it, because in most cases it will be inserted by the JavaScript parser. For more details about why you should use semi-colons.

Create an object constructor

function Person(firstName, lastName){

    this.firstName =  firstName;

    this.lastName = lastName;        

}  

var Khalid = new Person("Khalid", "Ansari");

Be careful when using typeof, instanceof and constructor.

typeof: a JavaScript unary operator used to return a string that represents the primitive type of a variable, don’t forget that typeof null will return “object”, and for the majority of object types (Array, Date, and others) will return also “object”.

constructor: is a property of the internal prototype property, which could be overridden by code.

instanceof: is another JavaScript operator that check in all the prototypes chain the constructor it returns true if it’s found and false if not.

var arr = ["a", "b", "c"];

typeof arr;   // return "object" 

arr  instanceof Array // true

arr.constructor();  //[]

Define a Self-calling Function

This is often called a Self-Invoked Anonymous Function or Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE). It is a function that executes automatically when you create it, If you want to use this function you can write in the following way: 

(function(){

    // some private code that will be executed automatically

})();  

(function(p,q){

    var r = p+q;

    return r;

})(40,50);

Get a random item from an array

var items_array = [12, 548 , 'a' , 2 , 5478 , 'toogit' , 8852, , 'freelance' , 2145 , 119];

var  randomItem = items[Math.floor(Math.random() * items.length)];

Get a random number in a specific range

This code snippet can be useful when trying to generate fake data for testing purposes, such as a salary between min and max.

var x = Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1)) + min;

Generate an array of numbers with numbers from 0 to max

var numbersArray = [] , max = 100;

for( var i=1; numbersArray.push(i++) < max;);  // numbers = [1,2,3 ... 100] 

Generate a random set of alphanumeric characters

function generateRandomAlphaNum(len) {

    var rdmString = "";

    for( ; rdmString.length < len; rdmString  += Math.random().toString(36).substr(2));

    return  rdmString.substr(0, len);

}

Shuffle an array of numbers

var numbers = [5, 458 , 120 , -215 , 228 , 400 , 122205, -85411];

numbers = numbers.sort(function(){ return Math.random() - 0.5});

A better option could be to implement a random sort order by code (e.g. : Fisher-Yates shuffle), than using the native sort JavaScript function

A string trim function

The classic trim function of Java, C#, PHP and many other language that remove whitespace from a string doesn’t exist in JavaScript, so we could add it to the String object.

String.prototype.trim = function(){return this.replace(/^s+|s+$/g, "");};  

A native implementation of the trim() function is available in the recent JavaScript engines.

Append an array to another array

var array1 = [12 , "foo" , {name "Joe"} , -2458];

var array2 = ["Doe" , 555 , 100];

Array.prototype.push.apply(array1, array2);

Transform the arguments object into an array

var argArray = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);

Verify that a given argument is a number

function isNumber(n){

    return !isNaN(parseFloat(n)) && isFinite(n);

}

Verify that a given argument is an array

function isArray(obj){

    return Object.prototype.toString.call(obj) === '[object Array]' ;

}

Note that if the toString() method is overridden, you will not get the expected result using this trick.

Or Use..

Array.isArray(obj); // its a new Array method

You could also use instanceofif you are not working with multiple frames. However, if you have many contexts, you will get a wrong result.

var myFrame = document.createElement('iframe');

document.body.appendChild(myFrame);

var myArray = window.frames[window.frames.length-1].Array;

var arr = new myArray(a,b,10); // [a,b,10]  

// instanceof will not work correctly, myArray loses his constructor 

// constructor is not shared between frames

arr instanceof Array; // false

Get the max or the min in an array of numbers

var  numbers = [5, 458 , 120 , -215 , 228 , 400 , 122205, -85411]; 

var maxInNumbers = Math.max.apply(Math, numbers); 

var minInNumbers = Math.min.apply(Math, numbers);

Empty an array

var myArray = [12 , 222 , 1000 ];  

myArray.length = 0; // myArray will be equal to [].

Don’t use delete to remove an item from array

Use splice instead of using delete to delete an item from an array. Using delete replaces the item with undefined instead of the removing it from the array.

Instead of…

var items = [12, 548 ,'a' , 2 , 5478 , 'foo' , 8852, , 'Doe' ,2154 , 119 ]; 

items.length; // return 11 

delete items[3]; // return true 

items.length; // return 11 

Use

var items = [12, 548 ,'a' , 2 , 5478 , 'foo' , 8852, , 'Doe' ,2154 , 119 ]; 

items.length; // return 11 

items.splice(3,1) ; 

items.length; // return 10 

Clearing or truncating an array

An easy way of clearing or truncating an array without reassigning it is by changing its length property value:

const arr = [11,22,33,44,55,66];

// truncanting

arr.length = 3;

console.log(arr); //=> [11, 22, 33]

// clearing

arr.length = 0;

console.log(arr); //=> []

console.log(arr[2]); //=> undefined

Simulating named parameters with object destructuring

Chances are high that you’re already using configuration objects when you need to pass a variable set of options to some function, like this:

doSomething({ foo: 'Hello', bar: 'Toogit!', baz: 42 });

function doSomething(config) {  

const foo = config.foo !== undefined ? config.foo : 'Hi';  const bar = config.bar !== undefined ? config.bar : 'Me!';  const baz = config.baz !== undefined ? config.baz : 13;  // ...

}

This is an old but effective pattern, which tries to simulate named parameters in JavaScript. The function calling looks fine. On the other hand, the config object handling logic is unnecessarily verbose. With ES2015 object destructuring, you can circumvent this downside:

function doSomething({ foo = 'Hello', bar = 'Toogit!', baz = 13 }) {  // ...}

And if you need to make the config object optional, it’s very simple, too:

function doSomething({ foo = 'Hello', bar = 'Toogit!', baz = 13 } = {}) {  // ...}

Object destructuring for array items

Assign array items to individual variables with object destructuring:

const csvFileLine = '1997,John Doe,US,john@doe.com,New York';const { 2: country, 4: state } = csvFileLine.split(',');

What is the difference between Java and JavaScript?

These are two different programming languages.

Javascript is a language that has gained tremendous popularity as a language on the web browsers to create dynamic and interactive web pages.

Java is a language that has got a similar popularity when you build a “backend” system, which is a fancy word for “almost anything”.

Despite the common prefix, they are not related; there creators are different and so are their origin stories (as highlighted by other answers). 

- JavaScript is a genius marketing scam that polluted the world of browsers exceptionally well. The browser reads JavaScript’s code line by line and executes it.

- Java is a general purpose language that is used almost everywhere, from Android mobile apps and cryptography to OS and cloud computing. Java’s code is stored in bytecoded format and then gets JIT compiled before the actual execution. In other words, it translates the bytecode to machine code.

- Java is class based. JS is prototype based. All objects, like Array or Function inherit from the Object.prototype which remains on top of the chain.

- JavaScript uses dynamic type checking (checks the variables while the code executes), unlike Java’s static checking system (variables are verified at compile time), which is more bug free.

- The word “Script.” It’s a joke, in case you didn’t get it.

NLP is a branch of data science that consists of systematic processes for analyzing, understanding, and deriving information from the text information in a smart and efficient manner. By utilizing NLP and its parts, one can organize the massive chunks of text information, perform various automated tasks and solve a wide range of issues like – automatic summarization, machine translation, named entity recognition, relationship extraction, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and topic segmentation etc.

NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to lexical resources like WordNet, along with a collection of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, and tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning, wrappers for industrial-strength NLP libraries.

NLTK has been called “a wonderful tool for teaching and working in, computational linguistics using Python,” and “an amazing library to play with natural language.”

Downloading and installing NLTK

1. Install NLTK: run pip install nltk
2. Test installation: run python then type import nltk and run nltk.download() and download all packages.

Pre-Processing with NLTK

The main issue with text data is that it's all in text format. However, the Machine learning algorithms need some variety of numerical feature vector so as to perform the task. Thus before we have a tendency to begin with any NLP project we'd like to pre-process it to form it ideal for working. Basic text pre-processing includes:

• Converting the whole text into uppercase or lowercase, in order that the algorithm doesn't treat the same words completely different in several cases.
• Tokenization: Process of converting the normal text strings into a list of tokens i.e. words that we actually want. The NLTK data package includes a pre-trained Punkt tokenizer for English.

           import nltk

           from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

           text = "God is Great! I won a lottery."

           print(word_tokenize(text))

           Output: ['God', 'is', 'Great', '!', 'I', 'won', 'a', 'lottery', '.']

• Noise removal: Process of removing everything that isn’t in a standard number or letter.
• Stop word removal: A stop word is a commonly used word (such as “the”, “a”, “an”, “in”). We would not want these words or taking up valuable processing time. For this, we can remove them easily, by storing a list of words that you consider to be stop words. NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) in python has a list of stopwords stored in sixteen different languages. You can find them in the nltk_data directory.  home/Saad/nltk_data/corpora/stopwords is the directory address.

           import nltk

           from nltk.corpus import stopwords

           set(stopwords.words('english'))

• Stemming: Stemming is the process of reducing the words to its root form. Example if we were to stem the following words: “Connects”, “Connecting”, “Connected”, “and Connection”, the result would be a single word “Connect”.

           # import these modules

           from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer

           from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize   

           ps = PorterStemmer()  

           # choose some words to be stemmed

           words = ["Connect", "Connects", “Connected”, "Connecting", "Connection", "Connections"]

           for w in words:

           print(w, " : ", ps.stem(w)) 

• Lemmatization: Lemmatization is the process of grouping along the various inflected forms of a word in order that they may be analyzed as a single item. Lemmatization is similar to stemming but it brings context to the words. Therefore it links words with similar meaning to one word.

           # import these modules

           from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer  

           lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()  

           print("rocks :", lemmatizer.lemmatize("rocks"))

           print("corpora :", lemmatizer.lemmatize("corpora"))  

           # a denotes adjective in "pos"

          print("better :", lemmatizer.lemmatize("better", pos ="a"))

          -> rocks : rock

          -> corpora : corpus

          -> better : good

Now we need to transform text into a meaningful vector array. This vector array is a representation of text that describes the occurrence of words within a document. For example, if our dictionary contains the words {Learning, is, the, not, great}, and we want to vectorize the text “Learning is great”, we would have the following vector: (1, 1, 0, 0, 1). A problem is that extremely frequent words begin to dominate within the document (e.g. larger score), however might not contain as much informational content. Also, it will offer additional weight to longer documents than shorter documents.

One approach is to rescale the frequency of words or the scores for frequent words called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency.

• Term Frequency: is a scoring of the frequency of the word in the current document.

           TF = (Number of times term t appears in a document)/ (Number of terms in the document)

• Inverse Document Frequency: It is a scoring of how rare the word is across documents.

           IDF = 1+log(N/n), where, N is the number of documents and n is the number of documents a term t has appeared in.

           Tf-idf weight is a weight often used in information retrieval and text mining.

           Tf-IDF can be implemented in scikit learn as:

           from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer

           corpus = [

           ...     'This is the first document.’

           ...     'This document is the second document.’

           ...     'And this is the third one.’

           ...     'Is this the first document?',]

           >>> vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer()

           >>> X = vectorizer.fit_transform(corpus)

           >>> print(vectorizer.get_feature_names())

           ['and', 'document', 'first', 'is', 'one', 'second', 'the', 'third', 'this']

           >>> print(X.shape)

           (4, 9)

• Cosine similarity: TF-IDF is a transformation applied to texts to get two real-valued vectors in vector space. We can then obtain the Cosine similarity of any pair of vectors by taking their dot product and dividing that by the product of their norms. That yields the cosine of the angle between the vectors. Cosine similarity is a measure of similarity between two non-zero vectors.

           Cosine Similarity (d1, d2) =  Dot product(d1, d2) / ||d1|| * ||d2||

          import numpy as np

          from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

          # vectors

          a = np.array([1,2,3])

          b = np.array([1,1,4])

          # manually compute cosine similarity

          dot = np.dot(a, b)

          norma = np.linalg.norm(a)

          normb = np.linalg.norm(b)

          cos = dot / (norma * normb)

After completion of cosine similarity matric we perform algorithmic operation on it for Document similarity calculation, sentiment analysis, topic segmentation etc.

I have done my best to make the article simple and interesting for you, hope you found it useful and interesting too.

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence powered piece of software in a device, application, web site or alternative networks that try to complete consumer’s needs and then assist them to perform a selected task. Now a days almost every company has a chatbot deployed to interact with the users.

Chatbots are often used in many departments, businesses and every environment. They are artificial narrow intelligence (ANI). Chatbots only do a restricted quantity of task i.e. as per their design. However, these Chatbots make our lives easier and convenient. The trend of Chatbots is growing rapidly between businesses and entrepreneurs, and are willing to bring chatbots to their sites. You might also produce it yourself using Python.

How do chatbots work?

There are broadly two variants of chatbots: Rule-Based and Self learning.

1. In a Rule-based approach, a bot answers questions based on some rules on that it is trained on. The rules outlined could be very easy to very complicated. The bots will handle easy queries but fail to manage complicated ones.
2. The Self learning bots are those that use some Machine Learning-based approaches and are positively a lot of economical than rule-based bots. These bots may be of additional two types: Retrieval based or Generative.
   1. In retrieval-based models, Chatbot uses the message and context of conversation for selecting the best response from a predefined list of bot messages.
   2. Generative bots can generate the answers and not always reply with one of the answers from a set of answers. This makes them more intelligent as they take word by word from the query and generates the answers.

Building a chatbot using Python

NLP:

The field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers is called Natural Language Processing. NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way. However, if you are new to NLP, you can read Natural Language Processing in Python.

NLTK:

NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries.

Importing necessary libraries

import nltk 

import numpy as np 

import random 

import string # to process standard python strings

Copy the content in text file named ‘chatbot.txt’, read in the text file and convert the entire file content into a list of sentences and a list of words for further pre-processing.

f=open('chatbot.txt','r',errors = 'ignore')

raw=f.read()

raw=raw.lower()# converts to lowercase

nltk.download('punkt') # first-time use only

nltk.download('wordnet') # first-time use only

sent_tokens = nltk.sent_tokenize(raw)# converts to list of sentences 

word_tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(raw)# converts to list of words

Pre-processing the raw text

We shall now define a function called LemTokens which will take as input the tokens and return normalized tokens.

lemmer = nltk.stem.WordNetLemmatizer()

#WordNet is a semantically-oriented dictionary of English included in NLTK.

def LemTokens(tokens):     

return [lemmer.lemmatize(token) for token in tokens]

remove_punct_dict = dict((ord(punct), None) for punct in string.punctuation) 

def LemNormalize(text):     

return LemTokens(nltk.word_tokenize(text.lower().translate(remove_punct_dict)))

Keyword matching

Define a function for greeting by bot i.e. if user’s input is greeting, the bot shall return a greeting response.

GREETING_INPUTS = ("hello", "hi", "greetings", "sup", "what's up","hey",)

GREETING_RESPONSES = ["hi", "hey", "*nods*", "hi there", "hello", "I am glad! You are talking to me"]

def greeting(sentence):

for word in sentence.split():

if word.lower() in GREETING_INPUTS:

return random.choice(GREETING_RESPONSES)

Generate responses

To generate a response from our bot for input queries, the concept of document similarity is used. Therefore, we start by importing necessary modules.

From scikit learn library, import the TFidf vector to convert a collection of raw documents to a matrix of TF-IDF features

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer

Also, import cosine similarity module from scikit learn library

from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

This will be used to find the similarity between words entered by the user and therefore the words within the corpus. This can be the simplest possible implementation of a chatbot.

Define a function response that searches the user’s vocalization for one or more known keywords and returns one of several possible responses. If it doesn’t find the input matching any of the keywords, it returns a response: “I’m sorry! I don’t understand you”

def response(user_response):

robo_response=''

sent_tokens.append(user_response)

TfidfVec = TfidfVectorizer(tokenizer=LemNormalize, stop_words='english')

tfidf = TfidfVec.fit_transform(sent_tokens)

vals = cosine_similarity(tfidf[-1], tfidf)

idx=vals.argsort()[0][-2]

flat = vals.flatten()

flat.sort()

req_tfidf = flat[-2]

if(req_tfidf==0):

robo_response=robo_response+"I am sorry! I don't understand you"

return robo_response

else:  robo_response = robo_response+sent_tokens[idx]

return robo_response

I have tried to explain in simple steps how you can build your own chatbot using NLTK and of course it’s not an intelligent one.

I hope you guys have enjoyed reading.

Happy Learning!!!