Change `this` to `window`

[ptarjan]

In https://github.com/nathanhammond/libphonenumber/blob/master/dist/libphonenumber.js#L1 the very first line is var aa = this. When using your library with browserify, your library will be in a closure whose context is not the window, but instead undefined.

Can you just change it to var aa = window? I'm sure this could be fixed in closure too, but I don't know that code well enough to open the issue.

[nathanhammond]

I feel like the root of this is an issue with Browserify. this in that closure should clearly reference the global object, and I don't want to hard-code that or make assumptions about the environment that this is going to run in. :/ Pragmatic me says "absolutely" and perfectionist me says "eh." Are there Browserify settings that can address this? (I've still never used Browserify.)

The other thing that I'm possibly game to do (some time after 6/16) is to add a UMD wrapper around everything–but I haven't any clue how to make that happen with Closure explicitly setting things on the global object.

Basically, the output has been mostly opaque to me since I built this. At this point it's not much more than a fancy wrapper around the installation instructions that exist in the libphonenumber readme–what I've done is hardly additive. (And more, reductive, which means to me that the Google libphonenumber output is at the wrong level of abstraction.)

[ptarjan]

Using https://github.com/thlorenz/browserify-shim I was able to patch your library in (it does the replacing of this with window). I tried to use https://github.com/eugeneware/debowerify to no avail, nor https://github.com/tminglei/browserify-bower. At least I have a solution if others have the same problem.

[ptarjan]

I ended up with this, and it makes me sad:

gulp.task('fix-libphonenumber-non-strictness', ['install'], function() {
  var lib = './bower_components/libphonenumber/dist';
  return gulp.src(lib + '/libphonenumber.js')
    .pipe(replace('var aa=this;', 'var aa=window;'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(lib));
});

[nathanhammond]

That's gross.

[supersam654]

As a compromise between not making assumptions about the environment but still supporting browserify (and anything else that has an undefined global object), what if you did aa = this || window;?