this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

2 equal signs will coerce the second operand into the type of first operand then do a comparison of it can. so 1 == "1" is true. this leads to strange bugs.

3 equal signs do not do implicit type conversion, cuts down on weird bugs. 1==="1" is false.

edit: it appears to be more complicated than that for double equals and the position of operands don't matter. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Equality

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

wow that seems super useful, thanks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn't it widen the types regardless of position? Meaning 1 == "1" will be compared as strings, not numbers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Equality

mdn goes into it more and it's way more involved than I thought, looks like order of operand doesn't matter. see the number to string section

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It seems it is that way, which is weird. You should always convert to the widest type, meaning string for comparing numbers and strings. I just checked that 1 == "01" is true, which means that "01" gets cast to an integer. And according to the document it might be that for example 1 == "a" would basically be interpreted as 1 === NaN which is false.