Javascript : assign variable in if condition statement, good practice or not?

Question

Hi all:

I moved one years ago from classic OO languages such like Java to Javascript. The following code is definitely not recommended (or even not correct) in Java:

if(dayNumber = getClickedDayNumber(dayInfo))
{
    alert("day number found : " + dayNumber);
}
function getClickedDayNumber(dayInfo)
{
    dayNumber = dayInfo.indexOf("fc-day");
    if(dayNumber != -1) //substring found
    {
        //normally any calendar month consists of "40" days, so this will definitely pick up its day number.
        return parseInt(dayInfo.substring(dayNumber+6, dayNumber+8));
    }
    else return false;
}

Basically I just found out that I can assign a variable to a value in an if condition statement, and immediately check the assigned value as if it is boolean.

For a safer bet, I usually separate that into two lines of code, assign first then check the variable, but now that I found this, I am just wondering whether is it good practice or not in the eyes of experienced javascript developers?

Many thanks in advance.

Edit : I will leave the question open for a moment just to collect more invaluable info :)

Answer 1

You can do this in Java too. And no, it's not a good practice. :)

(And use the === in Javascript for typed equality. Read Crockford's The Good Parts book on JS.)

Answer 2

I would consider this more of an old-school C style; it is not really good practice in JavaScript so you should avoid it.

Answer 3

I did it many times. To bypass the JavaScript warning, I add two parens:

if ((result = get_something())) { }

You should avoid it, if you really want to use it, write a comment above it saying what you are doing.

Answer 4

I wouldn't recommend it. The problem is, it looks like a common error where you try to compare values, but use a single = instead of == or ===. For example, when you see this:

if (value = someFunction()) {
    ...
}

you don't know if that's what they meant to do, or if they intended to write this:

if (value == someFunction()) {
    ...
}

If you really want to do the assignment in place, I would recommend doing an explicit comparison as well:

if ((value = someFunction()) === <whatever truthy value you are expecting>) {
    ...
}

Answer 5

It's not good practice. You soon will get confused about it. It looks similiar to a common error: misuse "=" and "==" operators.

You should break it into 2 lines of codes. It not only helps to make the code clearer, but also easy to refactor in the future. Imagine that you change the IF condition? You may accidently remove the line and your variable no longer get the value assigned to it.

Answer 6

You can do assignments within if statements in Java as well. A good example would be reading something in and writing it out:

http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.io/CopyFile.html?l=new

The code:

// Copies src file to dst file.
// If the dst file does not exist, it is created
void copy(File src, File dst) throws IOException 
{
    InputStream in = new FileInputStream(src);
    OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(dst);

    // Transfer bytes from in to out
    byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
    int len;
    while ((len = in.read(buf)) > 0) {
        out.write(buf, 0, len);
    }
    in.close();
    out.close();
}