Use the || operator

When do I get this error?

The "Use the || operator" error is thrown when JSLint encounters a conditional operator in which the logical expression and first assignment expression are identical. In the following example we use the conditional operator to provide default values to function arguments when that argument has no existing value:

function example(a, b) {
    "use strict";
    a = a ? a : "Default";
    b = b ? b : "Another";
}

Why do I get this error?

This error is raised to highlight unnecessarily verbose and potentially confusing code. The use of the conditional operator in this case can be replaced with the logical or operator || which does exactly the same thing:

function example(a, b) {
    "use strict";
    a = a || "Default";
    b = b || "Another";
}

This works because the || operator does not return a boolean value as you might expect. Instead it will return the result of evaluating one of its operands (ES5 §11.11):

The value produced by a && or || operator is not necessarily of type Boolean. The value produced will always be the value of one of the two operand expressions.

The || operator evaluates its first operand and if the result is falsy then evaluates the second and returns the result. In the previous example if b is undefined then the first operand will be falsy which results in the second operand "Another" being the result of the expression.


About the author

James Allardice

This article was written by James Allardice, Software engineer at Tesco and orangejellyfish in London. Passionate about React, Node and writing clean and maintainable JavaScript. Uses linters (currently ESLint) every day to help achieve this.