Question

I know that JSLint is only a guide and you should take what it says with a grain of salt, however, I’m curious how I can even resolve this warning without rewriting the entire function. Here is the function of interest:

function randomString(length) {
    var chars = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXTZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.split(''),
    str = '',
    i;

    if (!length) {
        length = randomNumber(chars.length);
    }

    for (i = 0; i < length; i++) {
        str += chars[randomNumber(chars.length)];
    }
    return str;
}

JS Lint tells me “JS Lint: Use the array literal notation [].” and it is pointing to the line with string.split(). How can I satisfy JSLint without having to re-write the entire function? Is it even possible?

I am aware that there are other methods to generate random strings; I’m interested in how to resolve the JSLint warning using this method.

Answer 1

You can call the String prototype split function with the string as the scope to avoid the warning:

var chars = String.prototype.split.call('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXTZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz', ''), 

Don’t know why JSLint complains as split is a String method.

See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/split

this also seems to pass through without complaints:

var alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXTZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz',
chars = alphabet.split("");