Allow to remove all EventEmitter listeners at once

[felixge]

This patch adds support for calling EventEmitter#removeAllListeners
with no parameters in order to remove all listeners as once.

See discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs-dev/Mcyal1ThTHY

This does not break the existing API signature, so I think it would be reasonable to consider this patch for 0.4.x.

[tj]

nice ! I wanted this a month or two ago

[xk]

Please Felix make it removeAllListeners_Of_Any_Kind_, the 'ofAnyKind' expressed as '*' :-)

You should have to say exactly what you want to delete, just as rm -R won't work unless you specify a what. You should have to say removeAllListeners( 'OF ANY KIND' ), and to say 'OF ANY KIND', the wildcard '*' is what's used universally, everywhere.

[chrisdickinson]

It would actually be cool to be able to specify a regexp instead of '*' for "Delete all listeners". This way, if you've got semi-namespaced events, you can delete entire swathes of them with a simple call:

    ee.removeListeners(/myapp.*/);
    // or to remove all:
    ee.removeListeners(/.*/);
    // or to remove a single one:
    ee.removeListeners('error');

[felixge]

@chrisdickinson regex seems a little too much for the node core for me. A way to get a list of all event types might be a better path?

[chrisdickinson]

Something like this, maybe:

https://gist.github.com/accd13ca4e2e7e92bc78

[chrisdickinson]

@felixge oh, sorry, didn't refresh the page before commenting again :) the general idea is that you accept a function that can operate on the event keys, and if it matches, delete those listeners. Since typeof(RegExp) is 'function', it works with regexen for free, or you can specify a callback that accepts the name of the event and the list of listeners.

[ry]

Thanks