A typeof Typo

Do you spot anything wrong with the following JavaScript?

let variable;
const isUndefined = typeof variable === undefined;
console.log(isUndefined);

Even TypeScript doesn’t flag this code, so the logic pans out and the code logs true, right?

Nope! There’s a sneaky typo on the second line of code here:

const isUndefined = typeof variable === undefined;

This condition will always evaluate to false.

It’s 'undefined', not undefined

The typeof unary operator returns a string describing the type of its operand, like 'number', 'string', 'boolean', and so on. But here, we’re checking if the type is undefined, which is never the case because everything in JavaScript has a well-defined type. What we really wanted to do is to check if the type is the string literal 'undefined':

const isUndefined = typeof variable === 'undefined';

The original code logs false because the typeof operator always returns a value no matter what operand you give it. However, the result may be the string 'undefined' if the operand itself is undefined. There are two scenarios where this may occur—either the operand was declared but never assigned a value, or the operand was never declared in the first place:

let var1;
console.log(typeof var1 === 'undefined'); // true
console.log(typeof var2 === 'undefined'); // true

Preventing the Typo with ESLint

This problem can be very tricky to spot—unless someone intentionally draws your attention to it, you may miss it during code review (unless you have a very good eye for detail). You may think this isn’t so bad because at least it doesn’t throw a runtime error, but that actually makes it worse. You want logical errors to crash your app rather than slipping past you silently.

This is technically one of those things that TypeScript should flag since it can be statically analyzed and should always be considered a bug. Unfortunately, as of this writing, TypeScript 4.7.2 doesn’t treat this sort of expression as an error.

Thankfully, if you’re linting your code with ESLint, there’s a built-in rule that can flag this issue for you: valid-typeof. Specifically, you’ll want to enable the requireStringLiterals option:

"eslint valid-typeof": ["error", { "requireStringLiterals": true }]

With this rule enabled, the following expression will now throw an ESLint error:

typeof variable === undefined;