Question

Google has a unit conversion feature that takes a human readable string such as:

1m to feet

and uses this as an unit conversion / calculator instruction. it also supports calculations on left side of the ‘to keyword’.

1 * (2 * 10) / 2m to cm

How would one go about implimenting a simular string interpretation in javascript?

EDIT added some sample code:

function UnitQuery(str) {
    var arr = str.toLowerCase().split(' '),
        len = arr.length,
        afterToKeyword = false,
        queryObj = {
            left : [],
            right : []
        },
        current = queryObj.left;

    for ( i = 0; i < len; i++ ) {       
        if (!afterToKeyword && arr[i].search('to') >= 0){
            afterToKeyword = true;
            current = queryObj.right;
        }
        current.push( arr[i] );
    }
    return queryObj;
}

console.info( UnitQuery("1 m to feet") );

Answer 1

Start by tokenizing the input .split() then taking action on the values.