"if" and "?": how they're different in Javscript

Maulik Chaudhary — Wed, 15 May 2024 10:36:51 +0000

You might have come across the conditional code which has "if" statements and at same time conditional code with ? question mark operator is also widely being used.

If both does the same thing then what is the best practice and when to use which?!

Turns out,

if statement is used when we just want to execute some block of code based on the condition.

if (true) {
 alert("Hello World");
else {
 alert("Good night!");
}

if we want to assign the result of a condition to a variable then question mark operator is something you should use.

const allowedAccess = age > 23 ? true : false;

although both can be used interchangeably.

Is null a dataType in Javascript?

Maulik Chaudhary — Sun, 12 May 2024 10:39:54 +0000

Well only way to check that out is to use typeof for different values.
If you check with all the possibilities, you'll find out that there are eight dataTypes:

number,
bigint,
string,
boolean,
undefined,
object,
symbol,
function

Yes, you might be wondering what about null?
null falls under object dataType:

check yourself by

typeof(null); // object

That’s an officially recognised error in typeof. Definitely, null is not an object. It is a special value with a separate type of its own. The behaviour of typeof is wrong here.

but if you dig deeper, functions are also an object.
So there is nothing right and nothing wrong here, it depends what context and usecase you're targeting.

DEV Community: Maulik Chaudhary

"if" and "?": how they're different in Javscript

Is null a dataType in Javascript?