documentcloud / documentcloud/underscore-contrib

Behavior of _.isAssociative and string primitives?

Open
#100 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

question
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
622
Forks
114
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

The comments for _.isAssociative describe an associative object as one which has elements which can be accessed by a key/index. Except for the term "object", string primitives meet this definition. However, _.isAssociative("string") will currently return false.

So it seems like this should be changed in one of two ways:

  1. Change the name to isAssociativeObject or...
  2. Return true for strings.

I can create a pull request to resolve this, but I'm not sure which way is preferred.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the _.isAssociative entry point and read its comments and current behavior for string primitives. This issue needs a maintainer decision between changing the name and returning true for strings; done means the preferred semantics are agreed and the implementation and documentation consistently reflect that choice.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.