Introducing validator.gs — an open-source library of string validation for Apps Script projects

Backstory

Ever had the task to verify if an input is really an email or a URL, was empty or maybe a JSON, perhaps something else altogether and had to make use of complex RegEx or a variety of if conditions to do so?

Well, no more!

Thanks to validator.js — an already existing npm module written in the same style of JavaScript that's compatible with our regular Apps Script projects, I was able to copy & modify roughly 98% of the it all to create an Apps Script library too.

Say hello to — validator.gs 🎉

Demo

Architecture

Here are the 2 things that I had to modify within the original validator.js library -

1. create a whole bunch of private methods/functions: this comes as part of the best practices too but i had a need to not display a whole bunch of "helper" functions to the users when the autocomplete gets triggered and so had to modify the original library a bit to introduce trailing _s to functions that ought not be seen
2. adding JSDoc-style documentation: this is applicable when creating custom functions too — allows the library user to better understand the kind of input that's expected within the editor

Licensing

well, let's face it — I'm not a skilled coder to have written a library from scratch and I knew that the best pieces of code (along with it's complexity) already existed elsewhere. So i did what i thought was best and reached out to the original license owner of the validator.js library to check if it was okay for me to do what I was about to and within an hour, I had an answer 🤩