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From: Arno Welzel <usenet@arnowelzel.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.javascript
Subject: Re: Writing type conversions
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:49:47 +0100
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Ben Bacarisse:

> John G Harris <niam@jghnorth.org.uk.invalid> writes:
> 
>> On 23 Nov 2020 12:29:27 GMT, ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
>> wrote:
>>
>>   <snip>
>>>  However, in the Java world many deemed »+ ""« to be bad
>>>  style because it does not express the intent of the
>>>  programmer to convert something to a string but would
>>>  mystify the reader. I do not share this point of view,
>>>  however, because I think the intent of »+ ""« is clear.
>>
>>   "" + x + 1
>> makes it more obvious.
> 
> Am I missing a joke?  (It does something else altogether.)

No - this is not a joke. Since JavaScript is loosely typed, the
expression "" + x + 1 is totally valid and will always create a string
as result - so having "" in the beginning makes this more visible.
However, the result value depends on wether x is a string not not.

x = "4";
y = "" + x + 2;

y will be the string "42"

x = 4;
y = "" + x + 2;

y will be the string "6"

x = 4;
y = x + 2;

y will be the number 6


-- 
Arno Welzel
https://arnowelzel.de