Most of the time, operators and functions automatically convert a value to the right type. That’s called “type conversion”.

For example, alert automatically converts any value to a string to show it. Mathematical operations convert values to numbers.

There are also cases when we need to explicitly convert a value to put things right.

ToString

String conversion happens when we need the string form of a value.

For example, alert(value) does it to show the value.

We can also use a call String(value) function for that:

let value = true;
alert(typeof value); // boolean

value = String(value); // now value is a string "true"
alert(typeof value); // string

String conversion is mostly obvious. A false becomes "false", null becomes "null" etc.

ToNumber

Numeric conversion happens in mathematical functions and expressions automatically.

For example, when division / is applied to non-numbers:

alert( "6" / "2" ); // 3, strings are converted to numbers

We can use a Number(value) function to explicitly convert a value:

let str = "123";
alert(typeof str); // string

let num = Number(str); // becomes a number 123

alert(typeof num); // number

Explicit conversion is usually required when we read a value from a string-based source like a text form, but we expect a number to be entered.

If the string is not a valid number, the result of such conversion is NaN, for instance:

let age = Number("an arbitrary string instead of a number");

alert(age); // NaN, conversion failed

Numeric conversion rules:

Examples:

alert( Number("   123   ") ); // 123
alert( Number("123z") );      // NaN (error reading a number at "z")
alert( Number(true) );        // 1
alert( Number(false) );       // 0

Please note that null and undefined behave differently here: null becomes a zero, while undefined becomes NaN.

alert( 1 + '2' ); // '12' (string to the right)
alert( '1' + 2 ); // '12' (string to the left)

ToBoolean

Boolean conversion is the simplest one.

It happens in logical operations (later we’ll meet condition tests and other kinds of them), but also can be performed manually with the call of Boolean(value).

The conversion rule:

• Values that are intuitively “empty”, like 0, an empty string, null, undefined and NaN become false.
• Other values become true.

For instance:

alert( Boolean(1) ); // true
alert( Boolean(0) ); // false

alert( Boolean("hello") ); // true
alert( Boolean("") ); // false

alert( Boolean("0") ); // true
alert( Boolean(" ") ); // spaces, also true (any non-empty string is true)

Summary

There are three most widely used type conversions: to string, to number and to boolean.

ToString – Occurs when we output something, can be performed with String(value). The conversion to string is usually obvious for primitive values.

ToNumber – Occurs in math operations, can be performed with Number(value).

The conversion follows the rules:

ToBoolean – Occurs in logical operations, or can be performed with Boolean(value).

Follows the rules:

Most of these rules are easy to understand and memorize. The notable exceptions where people usually make mistakes are:

• undefined is NaN as a number, not 0.
• "0" and space-only strings like " " are true as a boolean.

Objects are not covered here, we’ll return to them later in the chapter Object to primitive conversion that is devoted exclusively to objects, after we learn more basic things about JavaScript.