Question on return statement in a function

They look, and function, identically for me. Maybe you had a typo when you tried them.

I cut-and-pasted directly from your question above.

You say this was asked before? Can you provide a link to the original question?

This answer comes from the following webpage where the question is asked: https://www.toptal.com/javascript/interview-questions

I tried to understand it so I could explain it to you better, but it is a little complicated. The way you have written it above, it will work, but if it is written like so:

function foo1()
{
  return {
      bar: "hello"
  };
}

function foo2()
{
  return
  {
      bar: "hello"
  };
}

then it will return immediately after the return statement at the beginning of foo2

The reason for this has to do with the fact that semicolons are technically optional in JavaScript (although omitting them is generally really bad form). As a result, when the line containing the return statement (with nothing else on the line) is encountered in foo2(), a semicolon is automatically inserted immediately after the return statement.

No error is thrown since the remainder of the code is perfectly valid, even though it doesn’t ever get invoked or do anything (it is simply an unused code block that defines a property bar which is equal to the string "hello").

This behavior also argues for following the convention of placing an opening curly brace at the end of a line in JavaScript, rather than on the beginning of a new line. As shown here, this becomes more than just a stylistic preference in JavaScript.

Sorry if this is not very clear

Alastair

Hi Alastair and Steven, Thanks for replying back but what I am trying understand is why the placement of curly braces is making difference in the output. What is the right way to place the curly braces in the program. One of the video in Treehouse explains that Javascript ignores the blank spaces then why this difference in placement of curly brace.

If the opening curly brace is not on the same line, then the javascript compiler will add a semi-colon. This means the function finishes on that line and the rest is not read. If you add the brace at the end of the line then it will not insert the semi-Colon and the function is fine

Alastair was familiar with the original question, and he explained it. Note that when you re-type the functions on a single line, the problem goes away.

The catch is that a return statement doesn't have to have a value, so if you skip to the next line, it returns from the function without a value (showing "undefined").

But when you put any part of a value to return, in this case the opening brace of a literal object, it will return the entire value. The fact that it's a brace is not important. What matters is whether or not the return is on a line by itself.

Cool! Thanks guys. Got it now :)