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You Don't Know JS Yet: Types & Grammar - 2nd Edition

Chapter 2: Primitive Behaviors

NOTE:
Work in progress

So far, we've explored seven built-in primitive value types in JS: null, undefined, boolean, string, number, bigint, and symbol.

Chapter 1 was quite a lot to take in, much more involved than I bet most readers expected. If you're still catching your breath after reading all that, don't worry about taking a bit of a break before continuing on here!

Once you're clear headed and ready to move on, let's dig into certain behaviors implied by value types for all their respective values. We'll take a careful and closer look at all of these various behaviors.

Primitive Immutability​

All primitive values are immutable, meaning nothing in a JS program can reach into the contents of the value and modify it in any way.

myAge = 42;

// later:

myAge = 43;

The myAge = 43 statement doesn't change the value. It reassigns a different value 43 to myAge, completely replacing the previous value of 42.

New values are also created through various operations, but again these do not modify the original value:

42 + 1;             // 43

"Hello" + "!";      // "Hello!"

The values 43 and "Hello!" are new, distinct values from the previous 42 and "Hello" values, respectively.

Even a string value, which looks like merely an array of characters -- and array contents are typically mutable -- is immutable:

greeting = "Hello.";

greeting[5] = "!";

console.log(greeting);      // Hello.
WARNING:
In non-strict mode, assigning to a read-only property (like greeting[5] = ..) silently fails. In strict-mode, the disallowed assignment will throw an exception.

The nature of primitive values being immutable is not affected in any way by how the variable or object property holding the value is declared. For example, whether const, let, or var are used to declare the greeting variable above, the string value it holds is immutable.

const doesn't create immutable values, it declares variables that cannot be reassigned (aka, immutable assignments) -- see the "Scope & Closures" title of this series for more information.

A property on an object may be marked as read-only -- with the writable: false descriptor attribute, as discussed in the "Objects & Classes" title of this series. But that still has no affect on the nature of the value, only on preventing the reassignment of the property.

Primitives With Properties?​

Additionally, properties cannot be added to any primitive values:

greeting = "Hello.";

greeting.isRendered = true;

greeting.isRendered;        // undefined

This snippet looks like it's adding a property isRendered to the value in greeting, but this assignment silently fails (even in strict-mode).

Property access is not allowed in any way on nullish primitive values null and undefined. But properties can be accessed on all other primitive values -- yes, that sounds counter-intuitive.

For example, all string values have a read-only length property:

greeting = "Hello.";

greeting.length;            // 6

length can not be set, but it can be accesses, and it exposes the number of code-units stored in the value (see "JS Character Encodings" in Chapter 1), which often means the number of characters in the string.

NOTE:
Sort of. For most standard characters, that's true; one character is one code-point, which is one code-unit. However, as explained in Chapter 1, extended Unicode characters above code-point 65535 will be stored as two code-units (surrogate halves). Thus, for each such character, length will include 2 in its count, even though the character visually prints as one symbol.

Non-nullish primitive values also have a couple of standard built-in methods that can be accessed:

greeting = "Hello.";

greeting.toString();    // "Hello." <-- redundant
greeting.valueOf();     // "Hello."

Additionally, most of the primitive value-types define their own methods with specific behaviors inherent to that type. We'll cover these later in this chapter.

NOTE:
As already briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, technically, these sorts of property/method accesses on primitive values are facilitated by an implicit coercive behavior called auto-boxing. We'll cover this in detail in "Automatic Objects" in Chapter 3.

Primitive Assignments​

Any assignment of a primitive value from one variable/container to another is a value-copy:

myAge = 42;

yourAge = myAge;        // assigned by value-copy

myAge;                  // 42
yourAge;                // 42

Here, the myAge and yourAge variables each have their own copy of the number value 42.

NOTE:
Inside the JS engine, it may be the case that only one 42 value exists in memory, and the engine points both myAge and yourAge variables at the shared value. Since primitive values are immutable, there's no danger in a JS engine doing so. But what's important to us as JS developers is, in our programs, myAge and yourAge act as if they have their own copy of that value, rather than sharing it.

If we later reassign myAge to 43 (when I have a birthday), it doesn't affect the 42 that's still assigned to yourAge:

myAge++;            // sort of like: myAge = myAge + 1

myAge;              // 43
yourAge;            // 42 <-- unchanged

String Behaviors​

String values have a number of specific behaviors that every JS developer should be aware of.

String Character Access​

Though strings are not actually arrays, JS allows [ .. ] array-style access of a character at a numeric (0-based) index:

greeting = "Hello!";

greeting[4];            // "o"

If the value/expression between the [ .. ] doesn't resolve to a number, the value will be implicitly coerced to its whole/integer numeric representation (if possible).

greeting["4"];          // "o"

If the value/expression resolves to a number outside the integer range of 0 - length - 1 (or NaN), or if it's not a number value-type, the access will instead be treated as a property access with the string equivalent property name. If the property access thus fails, the result is undefined.

NOTE:
We'll cover coercion in-depth later in the book.

Character Iteration​

Strings are not arrays, but they certainly mimic arrays closely in many ways. One such behavior is that, like arrays, strings are iterables. This means that the characters (code-units) of a string can be iterated individually:

myName = "Kyle";

for (let char of myName) {
    console.log(char);
}
// K
// y
// l
// e

chars = [ ...myName ];
chars;
// [ "K", "y", "l", "e" ]

Values, such as strings and arrays, are iterables (via ..., for..of, and Array.from(..)), if they expose an iterator-producing method at the special symbol property location Symbol.iterator (see "Well-Known Symbols" in Chapter 1):

myName = "Kyle";
it = myName[Symbol.iterator]();

it.next();      // { value: "K", done: false }
it.next();      // { value: "y", done: false }
it.next();      // { value: "l", done: false }
it.next();      // { value: "e", done: false }
it.next();      // { value: undefined, done: true }
NOTE:
The specifics of the iterator protocol, including the fact that the { value: "e" .. } result still shows done: false, are covered in detail in the "Sync & Async" title of this series.

Length Computation​

As mentioned in Chapter 1, string values have a length property that automatically exposes the length of the string; this property can only be accessed; attempts to set it are silently ignored.

The reported length value somewhat corresponds to the number of characters in the string (actually, code-units), but as we saw in Chapter 1, it's more complex when Unicode characters are involved.

Most people visually distinguish symbols as separate characters; this notion of an independent visual symbol is referred to as a grapheme, or a grapheme cluster. So when counting the "length" of a string, we typically mean that we're counting the number of graphemes.

But that's not how the computer deals with characters.

In JS, each character is a code-unit (16 bits), with a code-point value at or below 65535. The length property of a string always counts the number of code-units in the string value, not code-points. A code-unit might represent a single character by itself, or it may be part of a surrogate pair, or it may be combined with an adjacent combining symbol, or part of a grapheme cluster. As such, length doesn't match the typical notion of counting visual characters/graphemes.

To get closer to an expected/intuitive grapheme length for a string, the string value first needs to be normalized with normalize("NFC") (see "Normalizing Unicode" in Chapter 1) to produce any composed code-units (where possible), in case any characters were originally stored decomposed as separate code-units.

For example:

favoriteItem = "teléfono";
favoriteItem.length;            // 9 -- uh oh!

favoriteItem = favoriteItem.normalize("NFC");
favoriteItem.length;            // 8 -- phew!

Unfortunately, as we saw in Chapter 1, we'll still have the possibility of characters of code-point greater the 65535, and thus needing a surrogate pair to be represented. Such characters will count double in the length:

// "☎" === "\u260E"
oldTelephone = "☎";
oldTelephone.length;            // 1

// "📱" === "\u{1F4F1}" === "\uD83D\uDCF1"
cellphone = "📱";
cellphone.length;               // 2 -- oops!

So what do we do?

One fix is to use character iteration (via ... operator) as we saw in the previous section, since it automatically returns each combined character from a surrogate pair:

cellphone = "📱";
cellphone.length;               // 2 -- oops!
[ ...cellphone ].length;        // 1 -- phew!

But, unfortunately, grapheme clusters (as explained in Chapter 1) throw yet another wrench into a string's length computation. For example, if we take the thumbs down emoji ("\u{1F44E}" and add to it the skin-tone modifier for medium-dark skin ("\u{1F3FE}"), we get:

// "👎🏾" = "\u{1F44E}\u{1F3FE}"
thumbsDown = "👎🏾";

thumbsDown.length;              // 4 -- oops!
[ ...thumbsDown ].length;       // 2 -- oops!

As you can see, these are two distinct code-points (not a surrogate pair) that, by virtue of their ordering and adjacency, cause the computer's Unicode rendering to draw the thumbs-down symbol but with a darker skin tone than its default. The computed string length is thus 2.

It would take replicating most of a platform's complex Unicode rendering logic to be able to recognize such clusters of code-points as a single "character" for length-counting sake. There are libraries that purport to do so, but they're not necessarily perfect, and they come at a hefty cost in terms of extra code.

NOTE:
As a Twitter user, you might expect to be able to put 280 thumbs-down emojis into a single tweet, since it looks like a single character. Twitter counts the "👎" (default thumbs-down), the "👎🏾" (medium-dark-skintone thumbs-down), and even the "👩‍👩‍👦‍👦" (family emoji grapheme cluster) all as 2 characters each, even though their respective string lengths (from JS's perspective) are 2, 4, and 7; thus, you can only fit half the number of emojis (140 instead of 280) in a tweet. In fact, Twitter implemented this change in 2018 to specifically level the counting of all Unicode characters, at 2 characters per symbol. 1 That was a welcomed change for Twitter users, especially those who want to use emoji characters that are most representative of intended gender, skintone, etc. Still, it is curious that Twitter chose to count all Unicode/emoji symbols as 2 characters each, instead of the more intuitive 1 character (grapheme) each.

Counting the length of a string to match our human intuitions is a remarkably challenging task, perhaps more of an art than a science. We can get acceptable approximations in many cases, but there's plenty of other cases that may confound our programs.

Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)​

To serve the growing need for JS programs to operate as expected in any international language/culture context, the ECMAScript committee also publishes the ECMAScript Internationalization API. 2

A JS program defaults to a locale/language according to the environment running the program (web browser page, Node instance, etc). The in-effect locale affects sorting (and value comparisons), formatting, and several other assumed behaviors. Such altered behaviors are perhaps a bit more obvious with strings, but they can also be seen with numbers (and dates!).

But string characters also can have language/locale information embedded in them, which takes precedence over the environment default. If the string character is ambiguous/shared in terms of its language/locale (such as "a"), the default environment setting is used.

Depending on the contents of the string, it may be interpreted as being ordered from left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL). As such, many of the string methods we'll cover later use logical descriptors in their names, like "start", "end", "begin", "end", and "last", rather than directional terms like "left" and "right".

For example, Hebrew and Arabic are both common RTL languages:

hebrewHello = "\u{5e9}\u{5dc}\u{5d5}\u{5dd}";

console.log(hebrewHello);                       // שלום

Notice that the first listed character in the string literal ("\u{5e9}") is actually the right-most character when the string is rendered?

Even though Hebrew is an RTL language, you don't actually type the characters in the string literal in reversed (RTL) order the way they should be rendered. You enter the characters in logical order, where position 0 is the first character, position 1 is the second character, etc. The rendering layer is where RTL characters are reversed to be shown in their correct order.

That also means that if you access hebrewHello[0] (or hebrewHello.charAt(0)) -- to get the character as position 0 -- you get "ש" because that's logically the first character of the string, not "ם" (logically the last character of the string). Index-positional access follows the logical position, not the rendered position.

Here's the same example in another RTL language, Arabic:

arabicHello = "\u{631}\u{62d}\u{628}\u{627}";

console.log(arabicHello);                       // رحبا

console.log(arabicHello[0]);                    // ر

JS programs can force a specific language/locale, using various Intl APIs such as Intl.Collator: 3

germanStringSorter = new Intl.Collator("de");

listOfGermanWords = [ /* .. */ ];

germanStringSorter.compare("Hallo","Welt");
// -1 (or negative number)

// examples adapted from MDN:
//
germanStringSorter.compare("Z","z");
// 1 (or positive number)

caseFirstSorter = new Intl.Collator("de",{ caseFirst: "upper", });
caseFirstSorter.compare("Z","z");
// -1 (or negative number)

Multiple-word strings can be segmented using Intl.Segmenter: 4

arabicHelloWorld = "\u{645}\u{631}\u{62d}\u{628}\u{627} \
\u{628}\u{627}\u{644}\u{639}\u{627}\u{644}\u{645}";

console.log(arabicHelloWorld);      // مرحبا بالعالم

arabicSegmenter = new Intl.Segmenter("ar",{ granularity: "word" });

for (
    let { segment: word, isWordLike } of
    arabicSegmenter.segment(arabicHelloWorld)
) {
    if (isWordLike) {
        console.log(word);
    }
}
// مرحبا
//لعالم
NOTE:
The segment(..) method (from instances ofIntl.Segmenter) returns a standard JS iterator, which the for..of loop here consumes. More on iteration protocols in the "Sync & Async" title of this series.

String Comparison​

String values can be compared (for both equality and relational ordering) to other string values, using various built-in operators. It's important to keep in mind that such comparisons are sensitive to the actual string contents, including especially the underlying code-points from non-BPM Unicode characters.

Both equality and relational comparison are case-sensitive, for any characters where uppercase and lowercase are well-defined. To make case-insensitive comparisons, normalize the casing of both values first (with toUpperCase() or toLowerCase()).

String Equality​

The === and == operators (along with their negated counterparts !== and !=, respectively) are the most common way equality comparisons are made for primitive values, including string values:

"my name" === "my n\x61me";               // true

"my name" !== String.raw`my n\x61me`;     // true

The === operator5 -- often referred to as "strict equality" -- first checks to see if the types match, and if not, returns false right away. If the types match, then it checks to see if the values are the same; for strings, this is a per-code-unit comparison, from start to end.

Despite the "strict" naming, there are nuances to === (such as -0 and NaN handling), but we'll cover those later.

Coercive Equality​

By contrast, the == operator6 -- often referred to as "loose equality" -- performs coercive equality: if the value-types of the two operands do not match, == first coerces one or both operands until the value-types do match, and then it hands off the comparison internally to ===.

Coercion is an extremely important topic -- it's an inherent part of the JS types system, one of the language's 3 pillars -- but we're only going to briefly introduce it here in this chapter, and revisit it in detail later.

NOTE:
You may have heard the oft-quoted, but nevertheless inaccurate, explanation that the difference between == and === is that == compares the values while == compares both the values and the types. Not true, and you can read the spec yourself to verify -- both isStrictlyEqual(..) and isLooselyEqual(..) specification algorithms are linked as footnotes in the preceding paragraphs. To summarize, though: both == and === are aware of and sensitive to the types of the operands. If the operand types are the same, both operators do literally the exact same thing; if the types differ, == forces coercion until the types match, whereas === returns false immediately.

It's extremely common for developers to assert that the == operator is confusing and too hard to use without surprises (thus the near universal preference for ===). I think that's totally bogus, and in fact, JS developers should be defaulting to == (and avoiding === if possible). But we need a lot more discussion to back such a controversial statement; hold onto your objections until we revisit it later.

For now, to gain some intuition about the coercive nature of ==, the most illuminating observation is that if the types don't match, == prefers numeric comparison. That means it will attempt to convert both operands to numbers, and then perform the equality check (the same as ===).

So, as it relates to our present discussion, actual string equality can only be checked if both operands are already strings:

// actual string equality check (via === internally):
"42" == "42";           // true

== does not really perform string equality checks itself. If the operand value-types are both strings, == just hands off the comparison to ===. If they're not both strings, the coercive steps in == will reduce the comparison matching to numeric instead of string:

// numeric (not string!) equality check:
42 == "42";             // true

We'll cover numeric equality later in this chapter.

Really Strict Equality​

In addition to == and ===, JS provides the Object.is(..) utility, which returns true if both arguments are exactly identical, and false otherwise (no exceptions or nuances):

Object.is("42",42);             // false

Object.is("42","\x34\x32");     // true

Since === adds a = onto the end of == to make it more strict in behavior, I kind of half-joke that the Object.is(..) utility is like a ==== (a fourth = added) operator, for the really-truly-strict-no-exceptions kind of equality checking!

That said, === (and == by virtue of its internal delegation to ===) are extremely predictable, with no weird exceptions, when it comes to comparing two actually-already-string values. I strongly recommend using == for such checks (or ===), and reserve Object.is(..) for the corner cases (which are numeric).

String Relational Comparisons​

In addition to equality checks between strings, JS supports relational comparisons between primitive values, like strings: <, <=, >, and >=.

The < (less-than) and > (greater-than) operations compare two string values lexicographically -- like you would sort words in a dictionary -- and should thus be fairly self explanatory:

"hello" < "world";          // true
NOTE:
As mentioned earlier, the running JS program has a default locale, and these operators compare according to that locale.

Like ==, the < and > operators are numerically coercive. Any non-number values are coerced to numbers. So the only way to do a relational comparison with strings is to ensure both operands are already string values.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the < and > have no strict-comparison equivalent, the way === avoids the coercion of ==. These operators are always coercive (when the types don't match), and there's no way in JS to avoid that.

So what happens when both values are numeric-looking strings?

"100" < "11";               // true

Numerically, of course, 100 should not be less than 11.

But relational comparisons between two strings use the lexicographic ordering. So the second "0" character (in "100") is less than the second "1" (in "11"), and thus "100" would be sorted in a dictionary before "11". The relational operators only coerce to numbers if the operand types are not already strings.

The <= (less-than-or-equal) and >= (greater-than-or-equal) operators are effectively a shorthand for a compound check.

"hello" <= "hello";                             // true
("hello" < "hello") || ("hello" == "hello");    // true

"hello" >= "hello";                             // true
("hello" > "hello") || ("hello" == "hello");    // true
NOTE:
Here's an interesting bit of specification nuance: JS doesn't actually define the underlying greater-than (for >) or greater-than-or-equal (for >=) operations. Instead, it defines them by reversing the arguments to their less-than complement counterparts. So x > y is treated by JS essentially as y <= x, and x >= y is treated by JS essentially as y < x. So JS only needs to specify how < and == work, and thus gets > and >= for free!
Locale-Aware Relational Comparisons​

As I mentioned a moment ago, the relational operators assume and use the current in-effect locale. However, it can sometimes be useful to force a specific locale for comparisons (such as when sorting a list of strings).

JS provides the method localCompare(..) on JS strings for this purpose:

"hello".localeCompare("world");
// -1 (or negative number)

"world".localeCompare("hello","en");
// 1 (or positive number)

"hello".localeCompare("hello","en",{ ignorePunctuation: true });
// 0

// examples from MDN:
//
// in German, ä sorts before z
"ä".localeCompare("z","de");
// -1 (or negative number) // a negative value

// in Swedish, ä sorts after z
"ä".localeCompare("z","sv");
// 1 (or positive number)

The optional second and third arguments to localeCompare(..) control which locale to use, via the Intl.Collator API[^INTLCollatorApi], as covered earlier.

You might use localeCompare(..) when sorting an array of strings:

studentNames = [
    "Lisa",
    "Kyle",
    "Jason"
];

// Array::sort() mutates the array in place
studentNames.sort(function alphabetizeNames(name1,name2){
    return name1.localeCompare(name2);
});

studentNames;
// [ "Jason", "Kyle", "Lisa" ]

But as discussed earlier, a more straightforward way (and slightly more performant when sorting many strings) is using Intl.Collator directly:

studentNames = [
    "Lisa",
    "Kyle",
    "Jason"
];

nameSorter = new Intl.Collator("en");

// Array::sort() mutates the array in place
studentNames.sort(nameSorter.compare);

studentNames;
// [ "Jason", "Kyle", "Lisa" ]

String Concatenation​

Two or more string values can be concatenated (combined) into a new string value, using the + operator:

greeting = "Hello, " + "Kyle!";

greeting;               // Hello, Kyle!

The + operator will act as a string concatenation if either of the two operands (values on left or right sides of the operator) are already a string (even an empty string "").

If one operand is a string and the other is not, the one that's not a string will be coerced to its string representation for the purposes of the concatenation:

userCount = 7;

status = "There are " + userCount + " users online";

status;         // There are 7 users online

String concatenation of this sort is essentially interpolation of data into the string, which is the main purpose of template literals (see Chapter 1). So the following code will have the same outcome but is generally considered to be the more preferred approach:

userCount = 7;

status = `There are ${userCount} users online`;

status;         // There are 7 users online

Other options for string concatenation include "one".concat("two","three") and [ "one", "two", "three" ].join(""), but these kinds of approaches are only preferable when the number of strings to concatenate is dependent on runtime conditions/computation. If the string has a fixed/known set of content, as above, template literals are the better option.

String Value Methods​

String values provide a whole slew of additional string-specific methods (as properties):

  • charAt(..): produces a new string value at the numeric index, similar to [ .. ]; unlike [ .. ], the result is always a string, either the character at position 0 (if a valid number outside the indices range), or the empty string "" (if missing/invalid index)

  • at(..) is similar to charAt(..), but negative indices count backwards from the end of the string

  • charCodeAt(..): returns the numeric code-unit (see "JS Character Encodings" in Chapter 1) at the specified index

  • codePointAt(..): returns the whole code-point starting at the specified index; if a surrogate pair is found there, the whole character (code-point) s returned

  • substr(..) / substring(..) / slice(..): produces a new string value that represents a range of characters from the original string; these differ in how the range's start/end indices are specified or determined

  • toUpperCase(): produces a new string value that's all uppercase characters

  • toLowerCase(): produces a new string value that's all lowercase characters

  • toLocaleUpperCase() / toLocaleLowerCase(): uses locale mappings for uppercase or lowercase operations

  • concat(..): produces a new string value that's the concatenation of the original string and all of the string value arguments passed in

  • indexOf(..): searches for a string value argument in the original string, optionally starting from the position specified in the second argument; returns the 0-based index position if found, or -1 if not found

  • lastIndexOf(..): like indexOf(..) but, from the end of the string (right in LTR locales, left in RTL locales)

  • includes(..): similar to indexOf(..) but returns a boolean result

  • search(..): similar to indexOf(..) but with a regular-expression matching as specified

  • trimStart() / trimEnd() / trim(): produces a new string value with whitespace trimmed from the start of the string (left in LTR locales, right in RTL locales), or the end of the string (right in LTR locales, left in RTL locales), or both

  • repeat(..): produces a new string with the original string value repeated the specified number of times

  • split(..): produces an array of string values as split at the specified string or regular-expression boundaries

  • padStart(..) / padEnd(..): produces a new string value with padding (default " " whitespace, but can be overridden) applied to either the start (left in LTR locales, right in RTL locales) or the end (right in LTR locales), left in RTL locales), so that the final string result is at least of a specified length

  • startsWith(..) / endsWith(..): checks either the start (left in LTR locales, right in RTL locales) or the end (right in LTR locales) of the original string for the string value argument; returns a boolean result

  • match(..) / matchAll(..): returns an array-like regular-expression matching result against the original string

  • replace(..): returns a new string with a replacement from the original string, of one or more matching occurrences of the specified regular-expression match

  • normalize(..): produces a new string with Unicode normalization (see "Unicode Normalization" in Chapter 1) having been performed on the contents

  • localCompare(..): function that compares two strings according to the current locale (useful for sorting); returns a negative number (usually -1 but not guaranteed) if the original string value is comes before the argument string value lexicographically, a positive number (usually 1 but not guaranteed) if the original string value comes after the argument string value lexicographically, and 0 if the two strings are identical

  • anchor(), big(), blink(), bold(), fixed(), fontcolor(), fontsize(), italics(), link(), small(), strike(), sub(), and sup(): historically, these were useful in generating HTML string snippets; they're now deprecated and should be avoided

WARNING:
Many of the methods described above rely on position indices. As mentioned earlier in the "Length Computation" section, these positions are dependent on the internal contents of the string value, which means that if an extended Unicode character is present and takes up two code-unit slots, that will count as two index positions instead of one. Failing to account for decomposed code-units, surrogate pairs, and grapheme cluseters is a common source of bugs in JS string handling.

These string methods can all be called directly on a literal value, or on a variable/property that's holding a string value. When applicable, they produce a new string value rather than modifying the existing string value (since strings are immutable):

"all these letters".toUpperCase();      // ALL THESE LETTERS

greeting = "Hello!";
greeting.repeat(2);                     // Hello!Hello!
greeting;                               // Hello!

Static String Helpers​

The following string utility functions are provided directly on the String object, rather than as methods on individual string values:

  • String.fromCharCode(..) / String.fromCodePoint(..): produce a string from one or more arguments representing the code-units (fromCharCode(..)) or whole code-points (fromCodePoint(..))

  • String.raw(..): a default template-tag function that allows interpolation on a template literal but prevents character escape sequences from being parsed, so they remain in their raw individual input characters from the literal

Moreover, most values (especially primitives) can be explicitly coerced to their string equivalent by passing them to the String(..) function (no new keyword). For example:

String(true);           // "true"
String(42);             // "42"
String(Infinity);       // "Infinity"
String(undefined);      // "undefined"

We'll cover much more detail about such type coercions in a later chapter.

Number Behaviors​

Numbers are used for a variety of tasks in our programs, but mostly for mathematical computations. Pay close attention to how JS numbers behave, to ensure the outcomes are as expected.

Floating Point Imprecision​

We need to revisit our discussion of IEEE-754 from Chapter 1.

One of the classic gotchas of any IEEE-754 number system in any programming language -- NOT UNIQUELY JS! -- is that not all operations and values can fit neatly into the IEEE-754 representations.

The most common illustration is:

point3a = 0.1 + 0.2;
point3b = 0.3;

point3a;                        // 0.30000000000000004
point3b;                        // 0.3

point3a === point3b;            // false <-- oops!

The operation 0.1 + 0.2 ends up creating floating-point error (drift), where the value stored is actually 0.30000000000000004.

The respective bit representations are:

// 0.30000000000000004
00111111110100110011001100110011
00110011001100110011001100110100

// 0.3
00111111110100110011001100110011
00110011001100110011001100110011

If you look closely at those bit patterns, only the last 2 bits differ, from 00 to 11. But that's enough for those two numbers to be unequal!

Again, just to reinforce: this behavior is NOT IN ANY WAY unique to JS. This is exactly how any IEEE-754 conforming programming language will work in the same scenario. As I asserted above, the majority of all programming languages use IEEE-754, and thus they will all suffer this same fate.

The temptation to make fun of JS for 0.1 + 0.2 !== 0.3 is strong, I know. But here it's completely bogus.

NOTE:
Pretty much all programmers need to be aware of IEEE-754 and make sure they are careful about these kinds of gotchas. It's somewhat amazing, in a disappointing way, how few of them have any idea how IEEE-754 works. If you've taken your time reading and understanding these concepts so far, you're now in that rare tiny percentage who actually put in the effort to understand the numbers in their programs!

Epsilon Threshold​

A common piece of advice to work around such floating-point imprecision uses this very small number value defined by JS:

Number.EPSILON;                 // 2.220446049250313e-16

Epsilon is the smallest difference JS can represent between 1 and the next value greater than 1. While this value is technically implementation/platform dependent, it's generally about 2.2E-16, or 2^-52.

To those not paying close enough attention to the details here -- including my past self! -- it's generally assumed that any skew in floating point precision from a single operation should never be greater than Number.EPSILON. Thus, in theory, we can use Number.EPSILON as a very small tolerance value to ensure number equality comparisons are safe:

function safeNumberEquals(a,b) {
    return Math.abs(a - b) < Number.EPSILON;
}

point3a = 0.1 + 0.2;
point3b = 0.3;

// are these safely "equal"?
safeNumberEquals(point3a,point3b);      // true
WARNING:
In the first edition "Types & Grammar" book, I indeed recommended exactly this approach. I was wrong. I should have researched the topic more closely.

But, it turns out, this approach isn't safe at all:

point3a = 10.1 + 0.2;
point3b = 10.3;

safeNumberEquals(point3a,point3b);      // false :(

Well... that's a bummer!

Unfortunately, Number.EPSILON only works as a "safely equal" error threshold for certain small numbers/operations, and in other cases, it's far too small, and yields false negatives.

You could scale Number.EPSILON by some factor to produce a larger threshold that avoids false negatives but still filters out all the floating point skew in your program. But what factor to use is entirely a manual judgement call based on what magnitude of values, and operations on them, your program will entail. There's no automatic way to compute a reliable, universal threshold.

Unless you really know what you're doing, you should just not use this Number.EPSILON threshold approach at all.

TIP:
If you'd like to read more details and solid advice on this topic, I highly recommend reading this post. 7 But if we can't use Number.EPSILON to avoid the perils of floating-point skew, what do we do? If you can avoid floating-point altogether by scaling all your numbers up so they're all whole number integers (or bigints) while performing math, do so. Only deal with decimal values when you have to output/represent a final value after all the math is done. If that's not possible/practical, use an arbitrary precision decimal emulation library and avoid number values entirely. Or do your math in another external programming environment that's not based on IEEE-754.

Numeric Comparison​

Like strings, number values can be compared (for both equality and relational ordering) using the same operators.

Remember that no matter what form the number value takes when being specified as a literal (base-10, octal, hexadecimal, exponential, etc), the underlying value stored is what will be compared. Also keep in mind the floating point imprecision issues discussed in the previous section, as the comparisons will be sensitive to the exact binary contents.

Numeric Equality​

Just like strings, equality comparisons for numbers use either the == / === operators or Object.is(..). Also recall that if the types of both operands are the same, == performs identically to ===.

42 == 42;                   // true
42 === 42;                  // true

42 == 43;                   // false
42 === 43;                  // false

Object.is(42,42);           // true
Object.is(42,43);           // false

For == coercive equality (when the operand types don't match), if either operand is not a string value, == prefers a numeric equality check (meaning both operands are coerced to numbers).

// numeric (not string!) comparison
42 == "42";                 // true

In this snippet, the coercive equality coerces "42" to 42, not vice versa (42 to "42"). Once both types are number, then their values are compared for exact equality, the same as === would.

Recall that JS doesn't distinguish between values like 42, 42.0, and 42.000000; under the covers, they're all the same. Unsurpisingly, the == and === equality checks verify that:

42 == 42.0;                 // true
42.0 == 42.00000;           // true
42.00 === 42.000;           // true

The intuition you likely have is, if two numbers are literally the same, they're equal. And that's how JS interprets it. But 0.3 is not literally the same as the result of 0.1 + 0.2, because (as we saw earlier), the latter produces an underlying value that's very close to 0.3, but is not exactly identical.

What's interesting is, the two values are so close that their difference is less than the Number.EPSILON threshold, so JS can't actually represent that difference accurately.

You might then think, at least informally, that such JS numbers should be "equal", since the difference between them is too small to represent. But notice: JS can represent that there is a difference, which is why you see that 4 at the very end of the decimal when JS evaluates 0.1 + 0.2. And you could type out the number literal 0.00000000000000004 (aka, 4e-17), being that difference between 0.3 and 0.1 + 0.2.

What JS cannot do, with its IEEE-754 floating point numbers, is represent a number that small in an accurate enough way that operations on it produce expected results. It's too small to be fully and properly represented in the number type JS provides.

So 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 resolves to false, because there's a difference between the two values, even though JS can't accurately represent or do anything with a value as small as that difference.

Also like we saw with strings, the != (coercive not-equal) and !== (strict-not-equal) operators work with numbers. x != y is basically !(x == y), and x !== y is basically !(x === y).

There are two frustrating exceptions in numeric equality (whether you use == or ===):

NaN === NaN;                // false -- ugh!
-0 === 0;                   // true -- ugh!

NaN is never equal to itself (even with ===), and -0 is always equal to 0 (even with ===). It sometimes surprises folks that even === has these two exceptions in it.

However, the Object.is(..) equality check has neither of these exceptions, so for equality comparisons with NaN and -0, avoid the == / === operators and use Object.is(..) -- or for NaN specifically, Number.isNaN(..).

Numeric Relational Comparisons​

Just like with string values, the JS relational operators (<, <=, >, and >=) operate with numbers. The < (less-than) and > (greater-than) operations should be fairly self explanatory:

41 < 42;                    // true

0.1 + 0.2 > 0.3;            // true (ugh, IEEE-754)

Remember: just like ==, the < and > operators are also coercive, meaning that any non-number values are coerced to numbers -- unless both operands are already strings, as we saw earlier. There are no strict relational comparison operators.

If you're doing relational comparisons between numbers, the only way to avoid coercion is to ensure that the comparisons always have two numbers. Otherwise, these operators will do coercive relational comparisons similar to how == performs coercive equality comparisons.

Mathematical Operators​

As I asserted earlier, the main reason to have numbers in a programming language is to perform mathematical operations with them. So let's talk about how we do so.

The basic arithmetic operators are + (addition), - (subtraction), * (multiplication), and / (division). Also available are the operators ** (exponentiation) and % (modulo, aka division remainder). There are also +=, -=, *=, /=, **=, and %= forms of the operators, which additionally assign the result back to the left operand -- must be a valid assignment target like a variable or property.

NOTE:
As we've already seen, the + operator is overloaded to work with both numbers and strings. When one or both operands is a string, the result is a string concatenation (including coercing either operand to a string if necessary). But if neither operand is a string, the result is a numeric addition, as expected.

All these mathematical operators are binary, meaning they expect two value operands, one on either side of the operator; they all expect the operands to be number values. If either or both operands are non-numbers, the non-number operand(s) is/are coerced to numbers to perform the operation. We'll cover coercion in detail in a later chapter.

Consider:

40 + 2;                 // 42
44 - 2;                 // 42
21 * 2;                 // 42
84 / 2;                 // 42
7 ** 2;                 // 49
49 % 2;                 // 1

40 + "2";               // "402" (string concatenation)
44 - "2";               // 42 (because "2" is coerced to 2)
21 * "2";               // 42 (..ditto..)
84 / "2";               // 42 (..ditto..)
"7" ** "2";             // 49 (both operands are coerced to numbers)
"49" % "2";             // 1 (..ditto..)

The + and - operators also come in a unary form, meaning they only have one operand; again, the operand is expected to be a number, and coerced to a number if not:

+42;                    // 42
-42;                    // -42

+"42";                  // 42
-"42";                  // -42

You might have noticed that -42 looks like it's just a "negative forty-two" numeric literal. That's not quite right. A nuance of JS syntax is that it doesn't recognize negative numeric literals. Instead, JS treats this as a positive numeric literal 42 that's preceded, and negated, by the unary - operator in front of it.

Somewhat surprisingly, then:

-42;                    // -42
- 42;                   // -42
-
    42;                 // -42

As you can see, whitespace (and even new lines) are allowed between the - unary operator and its operand; actually, this is true of all operators and operands.

Increment and Decrement​

There are two other unary numeric operators: ++ (increment) and -- decrement. They both perform their respective operation and then reassign the result to the operand -- must be a valid assignment target like a variable or property.

You may sort of think of ++ as equivalent to += 1, and -- as equivalent to -= 1:

myAge = 42;

myAge++;
myAge;                  // 43

numberOfHeadHairs--;

However, these are special operators in that they can appear in a postfix (after the operand) position, as above, or in a prefix (before the operand) position:

myAge = 42;

++myAge;
myAge;                  // 43

--numberofHeadHairs;

It may seem peculiar that prefix and postfix positions seem to give the same result (incrementing or decrementing) in such examples. The difference is subtle, and isn't related to the final reassigned result. We'll revisit these particular operators in a later chapter to dig into the positional differences.

Bitwise Operators​

JS provides several bitwise operators to perform bit-level operations on number values.

However, these bit operations are not performed against the packed bit-pattern of IEEE-754 numbers (see Chapter 1). Instead, the operand number is first converted to a 32-bit signed integer, the bit operation is performed, and then the result is converted back into an IEEE-754 number.

Keep in mind, just like any other primitive operators, these just compute new values, not actually modifying a value in place.

  • & (bitwise AND): Performs an AND operation with each corresponding bit from the two operands; 42 & 36 === 32 (i.e., 0b00...101010 & 0b00...100100 === 0b00..100000)

  • | (bitwise OR): Performs an OR operation with each corresponding bit from the two operands; 42 | 36 === 46 (i.e., 0b00...101010 | 0b00...100100 === 0b00...101110)

  • ^ (bitwise XOR): Performs an XOR (eXclusive-OR) operation with each corresponding bit from the two operands; 42 ^ 36 === 14 (i.e., 0b00...101010 ^ 0b00...100100 === 0b00...001110)

  • ~ (bitwise NOT): Performs a NOT operation against the bits of a single operand; ~42 === -43 (i.e., ~0b00...101010 === 0b11...010101); using 2's complement, the signed integer has the first bit set to 1 meaning negative, and the rest of the bits (when flipped back, according to 2's complement, which is 1's complement bit flipping and then adding 1) would be 43 (0b10...101011); the equivalent of ~ in decimal number arithmetic is ~x === -(x + 1), so ~42 === -43

  • << (left shift): Performs a left-shift of the bits of the left operand by the count of bits specified by the right operand; 42 << 3 == 336 (i.e., 0b00...101010 << 3 === 0b00...101010000)

  • >> (right shift): Performs a sign-propagating right-shift of the bits of the left operand by the count of bits specified by the right operand, discarding the bits that fall off the right side; whatever the leftmost bit is (0, or 1 is negative) is copied in as bits on the left (thereby preserving the sign of the original value in the result); 42 >> 3 === 5 (i.e., 0b00..101010 >> 3 === 0b00...000101)

  • >>> (zero-fill right shift, aka unsigned right shift): Performs the same right-shift as >>, but 0 fills on the bits shifted in from the left side instead of copying the leftmost bit (thereby ignoring the sign of the original value in the result); 42 >>> 3 === 5 but -43 >>> 3 === 536870906 (i.e., 0b11...010101 >>> 3 === 0b0001...111010)

  • &=, |=, <<=, >>=, and >>>= (bitwise operators with assignment): Performs the corresponding bitwise operation, but then assigns the result to the left operand (which must be a valid assignment target, like a variable or property, not just a literal value); note that ~= is missing from the list, because there is no such "binary negate with assignment" operator

In all honesty, bitwise operations are not very common in JS. But you may sometimes see a statement like:

myGPA = 3.54;

myGPA | 0;              // 3

Since the bitwise operators act only on 32-bit integers, the | 0 operation truncates (i.e., Math.trunc(..)) any decimal value, leaving only the integer.

WARNING:
A common misconception is that `

Number Value Methods​

Number values provide the following methods (as properties) for number-specific operations:

  • toExponential(..): produces a string representation of the number using scientific notation (e.g., "4.2e+1")

  • toFixed(..): produces a non-scientific-notation string representation of the number with the specified number of decimal places (rounding or zero-padding as necessary)

  • toPrecision(..): like toFixed(..), except it applies the numeric argument as the number of significant digits (i.e., precision) including both the whole number and decimal places if any

  • toLocaleString(..): produces a string representation of the number according to the current locale

myAge = 42;

myAge.toExponential(3);         // "4.200e+1"

One particular nuance of JS syntax is that . can be ambiguous when dealing with number literals and property/method access.

If a . comes immediately (no whitespace) after a numeric literal digit, and there's not already a . decimal in the number value, the . is assumed to be a starting the decimal portion of the number. But if the position of the . is unambiguously not part of the numeric literal, then it's always treated as a property access.

42 .toExponential(3);           // "4.200e+1"

Here, the whitespace disambiguates the ., designating it as a property/method access. It's perhaps more common/preferred to use (..) instead of whitespace for such disambiguation:

(42).toExponential(3);          // "4.200e+1"

An unusual-looking effect of this JS parsing grammar rule:

42..toExponential(3);           // "4.200e+1"

So called the "double-dot" idiom, the first . in this expression is a decimal, and thus the second . is unambiguously not a decimal, but rather a property/method access.

Also, notice there's no digits after the first .; it's perfectly legal syntax to leave a trailing . on a numeric literal:

myAge = 41. + 1.;

myAge;                          // 42

Values of bigint type cannot have decimals, so the parsing is unambiguous that a . after a literal (with the trailing n) is always a property access:

42n.toString();                 // 42

Static Number Properties​

  • Number.EPSILON: The smallest value possible between 1 and the next highest number

  • Number.NaN: The same as the global NaN symbol, the special invalid number

  • Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER / Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER: The positive and negative integers with the largest absolute value (furthest from 0)

  • Number.MIN_VALUE / Number.MAX_VALUE: The minimum (positive value closest to 0) and the maximum (positive value furthest from 0) representable by the number type

  • Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY / Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY: Same as global -Infinity and Infinity, the values that represent the largest (non-finite) values furthest from 0

Static Number Helpers​

  • Number.isFinite(..): returns a boolean indicating if the value is finite -- a number that's not NaN, nor one of the two infinities

  • Number.isInteger(..) / Number.isSafeInteger(..): both return booleans indicating if the value is a whole number with no decimal places, and if it's within the safe range for integers (-2^53 + 1 - 2^53 - 1)

  • Number.isNaN(..): The bug-fixed version of the global isNaN(..) utility, which identifies if the argument provided is the special NaN value

  • Number.parseFloat(..) / Number.parseInt(..): utilities to parse string values for numeric digits, left-to-right, until the end of the string or the first non-float (or non-integer) character is encountered

Static Math Namespace​

Since the main usage of number values is for performing mathematical operations, JS includes many standard mathematical constants and operation utilities on the Math namespace.

There's a bunch of these, so I'll omit listing every single one. But here's a few for illustration purposes:

Math.PI;                        // 3.141592653589793

// absolute value
Math.abs(-32.6);                // 32.6

// rounding
Math.round(-32.6);              // -33

// min/max selection
Math.min(100,Math.max(0,42));   // 42

Unlike Number, which is also the Number(..) function (for number coercion), Math is just an object that holds these properties and static function utilities; it cannot be called as a function.

WARNING:
One peculiar member of the Math namespace is Math.random(), for producing a random floating point value between 0 and 1.0. It's unusual to consider random number generation -- a task that's inherently stateful/side-effect'ing -- as a mathematical operation. It's also long been a footgun security-wise, as the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that JS uses is not secure (can be predicted) from a cryptography perspective. The web platform stepped in several years ago with the safer crypto.getRandomValues(..) API (based on a better PRNG), which fills a typed-array with random bits that can be interpreted as one or more integers (of type-specified maximum magnitude). Using Math.random() is universally discouraged now.

BigInts and Numbers Don't Mix​

As we covered in Chapter 1, values of number type and bigint type cannot mix in the same operations. That can trip you up even if you're doing a simple increment of the value (like in a loop):

myAge = 42n;

myAge + 1;                  // TypeError thrown!
myAge += 1;                 // TypeError thrown!

myAge + 1n;                 // 43n
myAge += 1n;                // 43n

myAge++;
myAge;                      // 44n

As such, if you're using both number and bigint values in your programs, you'll need to manually coerce one value-type to the other somewhat regularly. The BigInt(..) function (no new keyword) can coerce a number value to bigint. Vice versa, to go the other direction from bigint to number, use the Number(..) function (again, no new keyword):

BigInt(42);                 // 42n

Number(42n);                // 42

Keep in mind though: coercing between these types has some risk:

BigInt(4.2);                // RangeError thrown!
BigInt(NaN);                // RangeError thrown!
BigInt(Infinity);           // RangeError thrown!

Number(2n ** 1024n);        // Infinity

Primitives Are Foundational​

Over the last two chapters, we've dug deep into how primitive values behave in JS. I bet more than a few readers were, like me, ready to skip over these topics. But now, hopefully, you see the importance of understanding these concepts.

The story doesn't end here, though. Far from it! In the next chapter, we'll turn our attention to understanding JS's object types (objects, arrays, etc).

Footnotes​

  1. "New update to the Twitter-Text library: Emoji character count"; Andy Piper; Oct 2018; https://twittercommunity.com/t/new-update-to-the-twitter-text-library-emoji-character-count/114607 ; Accessed July 2022 ↩

  2. ECMAScript 2022 Internationalization API Specification; https://402.ecma-international.org/9.0/ ; Accessed August 2022 ↩

  3. "Intl.Collator", MDN; https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/Collator ; Accessed August 2022 ↩

  4. "Intl.Segmenter", MDN; https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/Segmenter ; Accessed August 2022 ↩

  5. "7.2.16 IsStrictlyEqual(x,y)", ECMAScript 2022 Language Specification; https://262.ecma-international.org/13.0/#sec-isstrictlyequal ; Accessed August 2022 ↩

  6. "7.2.15 IsLooselyEqual(x,y)", ECMAScript 2022 Language Specification; https://262.ecma-international.org/13.0/#sec-islooselyequal ; Accessed August 2022 ↩

  7. "PLEASE don't follow the code recipe in the accepted answer", Stack Overflow; Daniel Scott; July 2019; https://stackoverflow.com/a/56967003/228852 ; Accessed August 2022 ↩