Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Strings

Strings are enclosed by either single (') or double (") quotes and can contain zero or more characters:

    var empty    = '';
    var girl_cat = 'Sabine';
    var boy_cat  = "Dakota";
    var zip_code = '06517';

Your string can also contain quotes, but you need to be careful to escape any quotes that match the quotes you are using to enclose your string:

    var my_string = 'This "quoted text" is fine';
        my_string = "This 'quoted text' is fine";
        my_string = 'This string\'s "quote" is escaped';
        my_string = "This string's \"quotes\" are escaped';

It can get a little confusing if you don’t maintain some form of consistency. Most JavaScript developers tend to use single quotes to wrap strings . This is likely a holdover from other languages where double-quoted strings are processed differently than single-quoted ones.