Writing better javascript – Part 1

Since I have taken a deep dive into the world of JavaScript programming for a while now, I thought I would start a series of posts with some of the lessons learnt and some good JavaScript programming practices I follow to make my life easier. Here goes the first post …

Always use the “===” operator over the “==” operator unless you explicitly want to.

The difference between the “===” operator and “==” operator is that the “===” makes sure that the types of the values you are comparing are also equal whereas the “==” operator doesn’t. Well, what does that really mean? Well, take the example below

var test = “3”; //the variable test contains the string “3”
if(test === 3) {    alert(“‘===’ evaluated to true.”);}
if(test == 3) {    alert(“‘==’ evaluated to true.”);}

In this case “test === 3” comparison will evaluate to false because the variable ‘test’ contains the string ‘3’ and it is being compared to the number 3. Whereas “test == 3” comparison will evaluate to true because the ‘==’ operator ignores the types of the values being compared.

In most cases, you will want to do a ‘===’ comparison and not the ‘==’ comparison. Getting into the habit of always using the ‘===’ operator will help to avoid certain error conditions which are normally hard to locate and debug.