How do I put variables inside javascript strings?

if you are using ES6, the you should use the Template literals.

//you can do this
let sentence = `My name is ${ user.name }. Nice to meet you.`

read more here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Template_literals

With Node.js v4 , you can use ES6's Template strings

var my_name = 'John';
var s = `hello ${my_name}, how are you doing`;
console.log(s); // prints hello John, how are you doing

You need to wrap string within ` (backtick) instead of ' (apostrophe)

util.format does this.

It will be part of v0.5.3 and can be used like this:

var uri = util.format('http%s://%s%s', 
      (useSSL?'s':''), apiBase, path||'/');

Note, from 2015 onwards, just use backticks for templating

https://stackoverflow.com/a/37245773/294884

let a = `hello ${name}`    // NOTE!!!!!!!! ` not ' or "

Note that it is a backtick, not a quote.

---

If you want to have something similar, you could create a function:

function parse(str) {
    var args = [].slice.call(arguments, 1),
        i = 0;

    return str.replace(/%s/g, () => args[i++]);
}

Usage:

s = parse('hello %s, how are you doing', my_name);

This is only a simple example and does not take into account different kinds of data types (like %i, etc) or escaping of %s. But I hope it gives you some idea. I'm pretty sure there are also libraries out there which provide a function like this.