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JavaScript is a high-level programming language used by many programmers to develop web applications and websites. Although it is powerful, flexible, and easy to learn, it has some limitations, one of which is its inability to represent non-existent values.
In JavaScript, there are two values that indicate absence: null
and undefined
. They look similar, but actually have some differences.
null
The value indicates that the variable or expression has no value or no object. It is a special value which means that the variable does not point to any value or object. For example, if you were to declare a variable to store a person's name, but you didn't know their name, you would set the variable to null
.
undefined
The value indicates that the variable has been declared but has not yet been assigned a value. It can also be returned when using undefined properties and methods on the object. The former is because JavaScript variables are undefined
by default, and the latter is because JavaScript allows custom objects, allowing you to add any properties and methods.
However, both methods of representing non-existent values have some disadvantages. First, they are globally scoped variables in JS, which means you can reassign the appropriate variable by using null
or undefined
, potentially leading to errors and Inconsistent.
Secondly, they cannot represent a non-existent value, they can only represent that the variable does not point to any value or object. This is an important distinction. For example, if you have an array, but it does not have any elements, you cannot use null
or undefined
to indicate this situation. You could use an empty array, but this is not a good solution as it creates redundancy and unnecessary memory usage.
Therefore, people often use other tricks in their code to indicate the absence of values. A technique called "short-circuit evaluation" allows you to check whether a value exists using the operators &&
and ||
. If present, this value is returned, otherwise a default value is returned. For example, if you have some data but you're not sure if there's an attribute called "age" in it, you can use the &&
operator to check:
const age = data.age && data.age;
This statement will Check if data.age
exists, if it exists then assign it to age
variable, otherwise undefined
will be assigned (but you can't use null# here ##, since it would be possible to incorrectly treat
null as an existing value).
function greet(name) { name = name || 'Stranger'; console.log(`Hello, ${name}!`); }This function parameter
name is set to
'Stranger' by default. If the parameter
name is not passed in, or is
null or
undefined, then
'Stranger' will be used.
null and
undefined can represent non-existent values, their use will bring some disadvantages and limitations. Therefore, use caution when using these values and try to use other methods to express the absence of values.
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