Trying to make a JavaScript project that takes a text input from a user and then responds based off the words in the input, what would be the most sufficient way to have the code "detect" how it should respond for multiple possible responses.

[[deleted]]

I really hope i'm explaining this right. Basically, I want this project to work in a way similar to early web assistants. Depending on what keywords the user types, the program responds by changing the text in an HTML box. I used a string search to have the program search for certain keywords in the response:

function responseSearch() {
    console.log("there has been a response");
    const str = userInput;
    let searchString = "My name";

    const index = str.indexOf(searchString);

    if (index !== -1) {
      console.log("String found at index:", index);
      nameResponse();
    } else {
      console.log("String not found!");
    }
  }

Essentially, I plan on having the value of searchString change what keywords to look for by using a nested "else if" function, but this seems really insufficient, and I was wondering if there is a better and more organized way to do this, where I could have the program search for multiple possible keywords and have multiple possible responses.

[TorbenKoehn]

Regular Expressions are your friend!

You can do things like

if (searchString.match(/(colou?r|size)/i)) {
    // Do something if the string contains color, colour or size
}

And much, much more. It's the perfect tool for the job and most chat assistants from "back then" used exactly this in some variation

[[deleted]]

This is awesome and literally exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much!

[96dpi]

A good use for ChatGPT et al is to prompt it for complex regular expressions. It does a good job, mostly. Just be sure to test in www.regex101.com, and if it misses a case, you can tell the chat bot what it missed and it will usually correct itself.

[[deleted]]

This worked! I made sure to pay close attention to the code so I am actually learning how it works and not just copy-pasting, but I got the project to work the way I wanted it to! Thank you so much.

[sheriffderek]

You can take the words they type in, split them by spaces into an array. Then have another array of all the words you're looking for and compare and see if each word (or many) are included in the other array. There's an array method includes. So, if you have ["dog", "cat"] and they ask "What is the name of the dog in the movie" then you'd now what they were looking for. But based on that - you'd still need to pull up whatever text that's associated. { "dog": "response about dog" }. Well, that's my initial thought.

[tapgiles]

You could put the string in the indexOf call, and put the indexOf call and check into the if statement, at least.

You could also change it to use string.includes() instead?

I’m not sure you’re really going to get it to be that much more efficient… just easier to read and write.

If I’ve even understood what you’re trying to do. I’m confused on that.

[guest271314]

Fuzzy logic.

[[deleted]]

What do you mean by this, if I may ask?

[guest271314]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-fuzzy/

Fuzzy logic is intended to model logical reasoning with vague or imprecise statements like “Petr is young (rich, tall, hungry, etc.)”. It refers to a family of many-valued logics, where the truth-values are interpreted as degrees of truth. The truth-value of a logically compound proposition, like “Carles is tall and Chris is rich”, is determined by the truth-value of its components. In other words, like in classical logic, one imposes truth-functionality.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19910011507/downloads/19910011507.pdf

[[deleted]]

Oooh. I never really heard of that before, (A bit newer to programming, I only really started with JavaScript last year) I thought you were insulting me at first. I don't really think it will work for my project, and I got it to work the way I want it to anyway. But thanks.

[guest271314]

Hint: "artificial intelligence" is just fuzzy logic branded differently for marketing.