Equality
One thing to be careful about in JavaScript is the difference between ==
and ===
. As JavaScript tries to
be resilient against programming errors ==
tries to do type coercion between two variables e.g. converts a
string to a number so that you can compare with a number as shown below:
console.log(5 == "5"); // true , TS Error
console.log(5 === "5"); // false , TS Error
However the choices JavaScript makes are not always ideal. For example in the below example the first statement is false
because ""
and "0"
are both strings and are clearly not equal. However in the second case both 0
and the
empty string (""
) are falsy (i.e. behave like false
) and are therefore equal with respect to ==
. Both statements
are false when you use ===
.
console.log("" == "0"); // false
console.log(0 == ""); // true
console.log("" === "0"); // false
console.log(0 === ""); // false
Note that
string == number
andstring === number
are both compile time errors in TypeScript, so you don’t normally need to worry about this.
Similar to ==
vs. ===
, there is !=
vs. !==
So ProTip: Always use ===
and !==
except for null checks, which we cover later.
Structural Equality
If you want to compare two objects for structural equality ==
/===
are not sufficient. e.g.
console.log({a:123} == {a:123}); // False
console.log({a:123} === {a:123}); // False
To do such checks use the deep-equal npm package e.g.
import * as deepEqual from "deep-equal";
console.log(deepEqual({a:123},{a:123})); // True