Quick Tip - Double Bang

QUICK TIP TIME!!!!!

Double bang, double exclamation or not not whatever you want to call it. You will most likely see or use this in your development life.

What is this?

The double bang operator can be used when doing equality checking i.e if statements. Well its not actually an operator is two operators used together.

To really understand this we need to look at the NOT operator lets see this in action below:

console.log(1 == 1) // true
console.log(1 != 1) // false
console.log(!true) // false
console.log(!false) // false

This can be used when trying to determine if values equal other values but you can also use !! in some use cases. So if we wanted to check if a value is true but also the value could be null or undefined. As JavaScript is not strongly typed the below can happen:

console.log(!undefined) //true
console.log(!null) //true
console.log(!false) //true

This can be used to quickly determine if the value is true or false without having to do null/undefined checks e.g.

const cat = {name: 'Mittens', likes: 'string'};  
const dog = null;

console.log(!!cat); //true  
console.log(!!dog); //false 

Or for some reason you need a function to always return a boolean you could have something like below:

const hasItems = (arr) => !!arr.length;

//compared to

const hasItems = (arr) => arr.length !== 0;

Should you use this?

Probably not, it can confused your code and make things harder to read.