True Is Not Always True In JavaScript

Hello everyone👋

In this article, I will try to explain the behavior of the boolean data type of JavaScript.

We often use if statements in JavaScript to check if a value, that can be of any data type is true or false. But do you know that these values are not really true or false, rather they are considered as truthy or falsy values?

Explanation

Let's understand this with an example.

var val = "blog";
if (val) {
  console.log(true);
}

So in the above code snippet, we declared a variable val which is storing a string "blog".

In general, if statements expect a boolean expression or a boolean condition but here we are passing the variable val directly without any boolean expression.

And this if statement evaluates the value of val to true and execute its block. But why?

Why

In JavaScript, any non-zero number including the negative numbers and non-empty strings are termed as truthy values and the truthy values are translated to boolean true when evaluated in a Boolean context.

So in our example, as the value of the variable val is a string with data i.e, not empty, it is considered as a truthy value which evaluates to true in the if statement condition.

And the values other than the truthy values are termed as falsy values.

falsy values in JavaScript.

- false
- null
- undefined
- 0
- NAN
- ''
- ""
- 0n
- -0
- `` 
- document.all

Conversion

Convert the truthy and falsy values to boolean true or false.

You can pass the truthy or falsy value to the Boolean() and it will return true or false.

var val = "blog";
if (Boolean(val)) {
  console.log(true);
}

Or you can use the following syntax to convert it to a pure boolean value.

var val = "blog";
if (!!val) {
  console.log(true);
}

We know this truthy or falsy concept is not so impacting but it is always better to handle pure boolean values.

Originally published on blog.bibekkakati.me

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