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cody perry
PHP Development Techdegree Student 18,448 PointsWhy does a variable need to be an empty string at the beginning of the for loop?
Why can you not use message without it being set to an empty string before the for loop?
It returns undefined, but shouldn't you be able to set the message variable as just var message; instead of var message = ' '; before using it in the loop?
Does it only do that because you are adding to the variable at the beginning of the for loop? Or should you always set a variable to an empty string when you plan to add content to it?
2 Answers
rydavim
18,814 PointsThis is a great question.
You need to assign message the empty string value because you are trying to concatenate it in the for loop. message += something is the same as message = message + something. In this case, if you didn't assign a string value to message, you would be trying to concatenate an undefined variable with a string.
This isn't a problem when using the student variable, because you are assigning it a new value in each new block of the for loop.
Hopefully that clears things up for you, but please let me know if you have any other questions. Happy coding! :)
cody perry
PHP Development Techdegree Student 18,448 Pointsrydavim Thanks that clears it up a bit! :)