How do I cleanse the data (removing parenthesis and quotes) in NodeJS?

Question

I have a csv sheet where some of the cells could have either single record or multiple records like an array. A sample cell would look like either ["London"] or ["Cairo", "Montreal", "Paris"] - with the parenthesis included. I'm using sever.js to show these records in a visualization on a webpage.

Everything's fine except the parenthesis and quotes are being shown in the visualization. How do I write a rule/logic in nodeJS such that both parenthesis and quotes are not shown in the final visualization?

There's no point in cleansing the data in the csv file itself because I'm gonna have to use this code for hundreds of csv files, so it's better to write a rule in nodeJS.

The following's the server.js code I've used so far:

/**
* API for getting country Names
*/
app.get('/get-country-names.json', (req, res) => {
william.william().then(response => {
    res.json(response);
}).catch(message => res.send("Failed to read file" + message));
});

/**
* API to read file and return response in json
* Takes country id as parameter
*/
app.post('/get-city-sources.json', (req, res) => {
let countryName = req.body.countryName;
let city = req.body.city;

william.william().then(sources => {
    let filteredSources = [{ name: city, parent: null, color: 'red' }];
    Array.from(new Set(sources.filter(source => source.countryName === countryName && source.city === city).map(src => src.source)))
    .forEach(source => {
        let sourceArr = source.split(',');
        console.log(sourceArr);
        sourceArr.forEach(src => filteredSources.push({ name: src, parent: city, color: 'blue' }));
    });
    res.json(filteredSources);
}).catch(message => res.send("Failed to read file" + message));
});

app.listen(port, () => console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`))

Answer 1

Regular expression should do the trick. I'm not exactly sure where the stripping should happen within your code but this is a sample function that uses regular expression to strip out square brackets and quotes:

const formatCellString = (cell = '') => {
  return cell
    // strip out the square brackets
    .replace(/^\[(.*?)\]$/, "$1")
    // strip out the quotes
    .replace(/("\b)|(\b")/g, '')
}

formatCellString('["Cairo", "Montreal", "Paris"]'); => // Cairo, Montreal, Paris
formatCellString('["London"]'); => // London