JavaScript: The Good Parts

Falsy Values

JavaScript has a surprisingly large set of falsy values, shown in See Table A-1.

Table A-1. The many falsy values of JavaScript

Value	Type
0	Number
NaN (not a number)	Number
'' (empty string)	String
false	Boolean
null	Object
undefined	Undefined

These values are all falsy, but they are not interchangeable. For example, this is the wrong way to determine if an object is missing a member:

value = myObject[name];
if (value == null) {
   alert(name + ' not found.');
}

undefined is the value of missing members, but the snippet is testing for null. It is using the == operator (see Appendix B), which does type coercion, instead of the more reliable === operator. Sometimes those two errors cancel each other out. Sometimes they don't.

undefined and NaN are not constants. They are global variables, and you can change their values. That should not be possible, and yet it is. Don't do it.