Are Semicolons Optional in JavaScript ?

JavaScript is a very famous language and has a huge community. Everyone writes code differently but in a similar manner. Today, in this article I am going to talk about Semicolons in JavaScript.

Have fasten the seat-belt and let's go 🚀

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JavaScript is having a huge community that divides the Semicolon, some prefer to use it and some do not; even I personally try to avoid using semicolons, which looks better and cleaner.

And this is all possible because of JavaScript which does not have a strict rule to use a semicolon at the end of the line.

This process is known as Automatic Semicolon Insertion

Some Rules for Automatic Semicolon Insertion

The JavaScript parser will automatically add a semicolon when:

• Every next line starts with code that breaks the current one
• when the next line starts with a }, closing the current block
• when the end of the source code file is reached
• when there is a return statement
• when there is a break statement
• when there is a throw statement
• when there is a continue statement

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So this was it for this article and make sure to comment down what do you prefer to use semicolons or not?

Comments

[Volker Schukai]

Interested developer can find the standard here:
ecma-international.org/12.0/#sec-a...

[Brett Martin]

Exactly! I had a brief moment where I considered just doing that, but since I was so early in the project I just decided to add semicolons 🤷‍♂️

[Brett Martin]

In general I prefer when a language doesn't have semicolons (or really any character(s) to signify end of statement) such as Python and Haskell.

That being said, I use semicolons when I am writing JS just because it bothers me if there are sporadic uses of using semicolons when it is necessary while most lines are clean 😉

In my most recent project, I was trying to write without semicolons and ran into an issue I had not encountered before with code like:

const lib = require('some-lib')

(async () => {
  // doing some neat things here in a IIFE
})()

where I got this error:

index.js
(async () => {
^

TypeError: require(...) is not a function

The need for an explicit semicolon can appear at any time!