TypeScript – Get a Lambda expression as a string

One of the things I really like about C# is the ability to convert a lambda into a string. It’s useful for doing all kinds of things, especially when you are calling a 3rd party library’s method that expects a string identifying a member of an object.

I saw this was lacking in TypeScript, which was a pain because I wanted to make various parts of my Angular application more compile-time resilient to changes in the server’s API model.

Using the following code it is possible to take a call like this

someObject.doSomething<Person>(x => x.firstName)

From there we can get the name of the property referenced in the lamba expression. In fact it will return the entire path after the “x.”

abstract class Expression {
private static readonly pathExtractor = new RegExp('return (.*);');

public static path<T>(name: (t: T) => any) {
const match = Expression.pathExtractor.exec(name + '');
if (match == null) {
throw new Error('The function does not contain a statement matching 'return variableName;'');
}
return match[1].split('.').splice(1).join('.');
}
}

Example

The following example will show the string ‘country.code’

interface Address {
line1: string;
country: {
code: string;
name: string;
}
}

const result = Expression.path<address>(x => x.country.code);
alert('Result is ' + result);

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