Textal

Lightweight text utilities for JavaScript/TypeScript. Format, clean, search, and style text with zero dependencies.

Features

• Tiny - Lightweight with zero dependencies
• Tree-shakeable - Import only what you need
• Type-safe - Full TypeScript support with complete type definitions

Installation

# npm
npm install textal

# yarn
yarn add textal

# pnpm
pnpm add textal

Quick Start

import { titleCase, truncate, highlight, linkify } from 'textal';

// Formatting
console.log(titleCase('hello world')); // "Hello World"
console.log(truncate('This is a long text', 10)); // "This is a..."

// Styling
console.log(highlight('Error: something went wrong', 'Error', 'text-red-500'));
// <span class="text-red-500">Error</span>: something went wrong

console.log(linkify('Visit https://example.com'));
// Visit <a href="https://example.com">https://example.com</a>

API Reference

Formatting

• capitalizeText(str: string): string - Capitalize first letter
• titleCase(str: string): string - Convert to Title Case
• camelCase(str: string): string - Convert to camelCase
• pascalCase(str: string): string - Convert to PascalCase
• kebabCase(str: string): string - Convert to kebab-case
• snakeCase(str: string): string - Convert to snake_case
• constantCase(str: string): string - Convert to CONSTANT_CASE
• sentenceCase(str: string): string - Convert to Sentence case
• noCase(str: string): string - Convert to space-delimited lowercase
• slugify(str: string, opts?: { lower?: boolean, separator?: string }): string - Convert to URL-friendly slug
• truncate(str: string, length: number, end?: string): string - Truncate string by character count
• truncateWords(str: string, count: number, end?: string): string - Truncate string by word count
• pad(str: string, length: number, options?: { side?: 'start' | 'end' | 'both', fillChar?: string }): string - Pad string on specified side
• stripChars(str: string, chars?: string): string - Remove specified characters

Cleaning

• stripHtml(str: string): string - Remove HTML tags
• escapeHtml(str: string): string - Escape HTML entities
• unescapeHtml(str: string): string - Unescape HTML entities
• normalizeWhitespace(str: string, opts?: { collapse?: boolean, trim?: boolean, collapseNewlines?: boolean }): string - Normalize whitespace with options
• removePunctuation(str: string): string - Remove punctuation
• onlyAlpha(str: string): string - Keep only alphabetic characters
• onlyNumeric(str: string): string - Keep only numeric characters
• toAscii(str: string): string - Convert to ASCII (remove diacritics)
• filterChars(str: string, opts: { alpha?: boolean, numeric?: boolean, spaces?: boolean, punctuation?: boolean, extras?: RegExp }): string - Filter characters based on criteria
• stripAnsi(str: string): string - Remove ANSI escape codes
• dedent(str: string): string - Remove common leading indentation
• collapseNewlines(str: string, max?: number): string - Collapse consecutive newlines
• trimLines(str: string): string - Trim whitespace from each line

Searching

• contains(str: string, term: string, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean }): boolean - Check if string contains term
• count(str: string, term: string, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean }): number - Count term occurrences
• extract(str: string, pattern: RegExp): string[] - Extract all regex matches
• between(str: string, start: string, end: string): string - Extract text between delimiters (first match)
• betweenAll(str: string, start: string, end: string): string[] - Extract all text between delimiters
• startsWith(str: string, term: string, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean }): boolean - Check if string starts with term
• endsWith(str: string, term: string, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean }): boolean - Check if string ends with term
• indexOfAll(str: string, term: string, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean }): number[] - Find all positions of term
• nthIndexOf(str: string, term: string, n: number, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean }): number - Find nth occurrence position

Styling

• wrap(str: string, tag?: string, className?: string): string - Wrap text in HTML tag
• highlight(str: string, term: string, className?: string, opts?: { caseSensitive?: boolean, wholeWord?: boolean }): string - Highlight search terms
• linkify(str: string, opts?: { target?: '_blank' | '_self', rel?: string, className?: string }): string - Convert URLs to links
• nl2br(str: string): string - Convert newlines to HTML <br> tags

Metrics

• wordCount(str: string): number - Count words
• charCount(str: string, opts?: { excludeSpaces?: boolean }): number - Count characters
• readingTime(str: string, wpm?: number): { minutes: number, seconds: number, words: number } - Estimate reading time
• lineCount(str: string): number - Count lines
• sentenceCount(str: string): number - Count sentences
• byteLength(str: string): number - Get byte length in UTF-8
• graphemeCount(str: string): number - Count grapheme clusters (user-perceived characters)

Utilities

• escapeRegex(str: string): string - Escape special regex characters for use in RegExp
• tokenizeWords(str: string): string[] - Split string into word tokens
• splitLines(str: string): string[] - Split string into lines
• joinLines(lines: string[]): string - Join lines into string
• uniqueLines(str: string): string - Remove duplicate lines

Date

• parseDate(str: string): Date - Parse string into Date object
• formatDate(date: Date, format?: string): string - Format Date object using a format string (e.g. "yyyy-MM-dd")

Format Tokens

| Token | Output | Description | |-------|--------|-------------| | yyyy | 2024 | 4-digit year | | yy | 24 | 2-digit year | | MMMM | January | Full month name | | MMM | Jan | Short month name | | MM | 01-12 | 2-digit month | | M | 1-12 | Month | | dd | 01-31 | 2-digit day | | d | 1-31 | Day | | EEEE | Monday | Full day name | | EEE | Mon | Short day name | | HH | 00-23 | 2-digit 24-hour | | H | 0-23 | 24-hour | | hh | 01-12 | 2-digit 12-hour | | h | 1-12 | 12-hour | | mm | 00-59 | 2-digit minutes | | m | 0-59 | Minutes | | ss | 00-59 | 2-digit seconds | | s | 0-59 | Seconds | | SSS | 000-999 | Milliseconds | | A / AA | AM/PM | Uppercase AM/PM | | a / aa | am/pm | Lowercase am/pm |

Examples

Formatting Text

import { camelCase, kebabCase, snakeCase, titleCase } from 'textal';

console.log(camelCase('hello-world')); // "helloWorld"
console.log(kebabCase('helloWorld')); // "hello-world"
console.log(snakeCase('helloWorld')); // "hello_world"
console.log(titleCase('hello world')); // "Hello World"

Cleaning Text

import { stripHtml, toAscii, normalizeWhitespace } from 'textal';

console.log(stripHtml('<p>Hello <b>world</b>!</p>')); // "Hello world!"
console.log(toAscii('café')); // "cafe"
console.log(normalizeWhitespace('  Hello   world!  ')); // "Hello world!"

Searching in Text

import { contains, count, between } from 'textal';

console.log(contains('Hello world', 'WORLD')); // true (case-insensitive by default)
console.log(count('banana', 'ana')); // 2 (overlapping matches)
console.log(between('Hello [world]', '[', ']')); // "world"

Styling Text

import { highlight, linkify } from 'textal';

// Highlight search terms
const text = 'Error: Something went wrong';
const highlighted = highlight(text, 'error', 'text-red-500');
// <span class="text-red-500">Error</span>: Something went wrong

// Convert URLs to links
const message = 'Visit https://example.com for more info';
const linked = linkify(message, {
  target: '_blank',
  rel: 'noopener noreferrer',
  className: 'text-blue-500'
});
// Visit <a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="text-blue-500">https://example.com</a> for more info

Text Metrics

import { wordCount, charCount, readingTime } from 'textal';

const text = 'This is a sample text.';

console.log(wordCount(text)); // 5
console.log(charCount(text)); // 22
console.log(readingTime(text, 200));
// { minutes: 0, seconds: 2, words: 5 }

Working with Dates

import { parseDate, formatDate } from 'textal';

// Parse date strings
const date = parseDate('2024-01-15T14:30:45');

// Format dates with various patterns
console.log(formatDate(date, 'yyyy-MM-dd'));           // '2024-01-15'
console.log(formatDate(date, 'MMMM d, yyyy'));         // 'January 15, 2024'
console.log(formatDate(date, 'EEEE, MMM d'));          // 'Monday, Jan 15'
console.log(formatDate(date, 'h:mm A'));               // '2:30 PM'
console.log(formatDate(date, 'HH:mm:ss'));             // '14:30:45'
console.log(formatDate(date, 'MM/dd/yy'));             // '01/15/24'

Browser Support

Textal works in all modern browsers and Node.js 16+. For older environments, you may need to include polyfills for:

• String.prototype.normalize (for toAscii)
• Object.fromEntries (for some utility functions)

License

MIT © Aidan McAlister

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our contributing guide to get started.