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JavaScript

Posted by Ariel Aronica
Ariel Aronica
6,646 Points

A bit of confusion here with quotations.

This is for the JavaScript Basics Making Decisions with Conditional Statements (Introducing Conditional Statements) lesson. This is in reference to a true condition.

I'm a little confused right now about using quotations in JS. In the earlier lessons, Dave had said that as long as you are consistent with quotations within your code, it won't matter if you use " vs '. In this part of the video, when I tried to run part of a conditional statement with document.write inside, it wouldn't accept the ', only ". Is there a reason for this?

Here's a snapshot of the workspace. It works fine, I just don't understand why I needed to switch my quotations.

https://w.trhou.se/s8or5uzmel

1 Answer

Josh Thackeray
Josh Thackeray
9,895 Points

When you are using quotations for your strings, there will be common times where you need to place the ' in words like there's, or where's. If you was to use ' to surround the whole of a string with these characters used inside that string as well, the JavaScript interpreter would think you are wanting to close the string and then class the rest of the text as an error. That is why it is preferred to use " when stating strings that may contain these characters (').

This does not mean you cannot use the ' when writing strings, you can always place a \ before the quotation mark that is just a character in the string and not meant to end the string. This allows the interpreter to ignore the quotation mark and keep it inside the string without affecting the code.

Hope this makes sense. It is explained very well in the videos, I'd go back and watch the videos again if you are still unsure.

Ariel Aronica
Ariel Aronica
6,646 Points

Thanks, Josh. That helps!