Question

I have a javascript chat bot where a person can type into an input box any question they like and hope to get an accurate answer. I can do this but I know I’m going about this all wrong because I don’t know what position the number will appear in the sentence. If a person types in exactly:

what’s the square root of 5 this works fine.

If he types in things like this it doesn’t.

what is the square root of the 5

the square root of 5 is what

do you know what the square root of 5 is

etc

I need to be able to determine where the number appears in the sentence then do the calculation from there. Note the line below is part of a bigger working chatbot. In the line below I’m just trying to be able to answer any square root question regardless of where the number appears in the sentence. I also know there are many pitfalls with an open ended input box where a person can type anything such as spelling errors etc. This is just for entertainment not a serious scientific project. 🙂

if(
    (word[0]=="what's") &&
    (word[1]=="the") &&
    (word[2]=="square") &&
    (word[3]=="root") &&
    (word [4]=="of") &&
    (input.search(/\d{1,10}/)!=-1) &&
    (num_of_words==6)
){        
    var root= word[5];
    if(root<0){ 
        document.result.result.value = "The square root of a negative number is not possible.";
    }else{
         word[5] = Math.sqrt(root);
         word[5] = Math.round(word[5]*100)/100 
         document.result.result.value = "The square root of "+ root +" is "+ word[5] +"."; 
    }
    return true;
}

Just to be clear the bot is written using “If statemments” for a reason. If the input in this case doesn’t include the words “what” and “square root” and “some number” the line doesn’t trigger and is answered further down by the bot with a generic “I don’t know type of response”. So I’m hoping any answer will fit the format I am using. Be kind, I’m new here. I like making bots but I’m not much of a programmer. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can do this using a regular expression.

"What is the sqrt of 5?".match(/\d+/g);
["5"]

The output is an array containing all of the numbers found in the string. If you have more than one, like “Is the square root of 100 10?” then it will be

"Is the square root of 100 10?".match(/\d+/g);
["100", "10"]

so you can pick what number you want to use in your script.