Question

I have these strings which are addresses of files and folder:

1. ../../../folder1/sub1/sub12/
2. ../../../folder1/
3. ../../../another-folder/

I want to compare them using javascript – possibily jquery – to see if for example string 1 have a part egual to string 2 but something more saying that string 1 is child of string 2.

How can i do this?

Answer 1

In case your string can contain also absolute paths or paths containing .. not only at the beginning I would recommend checking if .indexOf return 0 instead of anything that is not -1.

It can help with cases like.

var path1 = "/rootFolder/";
var path2 = "../folder/rootFolder/";

if (path2.indexOf(path1) === 0) {
  console.log("You want this");  // won't get executed => good
}

if (path2.indexOf(path1) !=-1) {
  console.log("You don't want this"); // will get executed => bad
}