Understanding Datatypes in JavaScript

17 May 2022

Beginner

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JavaScript is a dynamic programming language. It means you don't have to declare the type of a variable at the time of declaration, its type will be determined automatically at the time of program execution i.e at run-time. This is the reason you can have the same variable for different types.

Javascript Dynamic typing Example

<script>
var x = 42; // here, x is a Number
var x = "DOT NET TRICKS"; // here, x is a String
var x = true; // here, x is a Boolean
var x = {name:'John', age:34}; // here, x is an Object
</script>

JavaScript Data types

Typically, JavaScript has two types of data types: Primitive and Non-Primitive(Objects).

Primitive data type

The primitive data type is a kind of type that holds a single value at a time based upon their specification as given below.

Number:

The number data type holds 64-bit binary format which can be a negative or a positive number, and also with or without the decimal place. The example numbers can be 25, 45856, 0.4589, -2588, -115.94775.

String:

The string data type can have textual data which is a collection of sequential characters of 16-bit unsigned integer values, and the example of string values can be "dotnettricks", "DotNetTricks", "Hello World" and so on.

Boolean:

The Boolean data type can be one of two values or the possibilities, either true or false. and the booleans are used to represent the logical entity.

Null:

The null data type does not have any value, not even an empty string or 0 (zero), in short, there is nothing as the value in it which is why it is called a special value.

Undefined:

If any of the variables do not have any assigned value then it has a special value called "undefined".

Symbol:

A value having the data type assigned as a "Symbol" can be referred to as a "Symbol value". The symbol value can be created by invoking the function Symbol(), which dynamically produces anonymous and unique values accordingly.

Even if we create any symbol with the same kind of description then still it acts as a unique value.

Bigint:

The BigInt data type is a numeric primitive type in JavaScript that can be represented as an integer with random precisions. and with BigInts, we can safely store and operate on large integer numbers even beyond the safe integer limit for Numbers effectively.

Non-primitive data type

The JavaScript object data type can contain a collection of values such as "name: value" pairs. and these pairs provide a useful way to store and access the related data in a structured manner. The object literal syntax is made up of "name: value: pairs which are also called as a "key-value" pair which can be separated by the colons with curly braces on either side.

Typically, the object syntax can be used to hold data that are inter-related, such as the information contained in an Id, below is a simple example of the student object with the set of key and value pairs.

{

id: 123,

name: "first_name last_name",

age: 20,

grade, 11

}

As you can see into the above object example, it has a set of four different key and value pairs such as id, name, age, and grade, that represents the details of a single student, this way we can use an object to represent a single entity with the set of key-value pairs associated with each other.

The typeof Operator

JavaScript typeof operator is used to find the type of a JavaScript variable.

<script>
typeof "John" // returns string 
typeof 3.14 // returns number
typeof Infinity; // returns number
typeof NaN; // returns number
typeof false // returns Boolean
typeof null // returns object and this is bug in ECMA script5

typeof [1,2,3,4] // returns object
typeof {name:'John', age:34} // returns object
typeof function(){} // returns function
typeof /^[0-9]$/I // returns object

var d = new Date();
typeof d // returns object
</script>

What do you think?

I hope, now you have a better understanding of JavaScript data type. I would like to have feedback from my blog readers. Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this article are always welcome.

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