String Data Type in Javascript

Now as you might know that there are different kinds of data such as the name of a person is in the form of text and the age of a person is a numerical value. So, let’s see how you can handle different kinds of data in JavaScript.

JavaScript has six primitive datatypes - string, number, boolean, null, undefined (five types in ES5) and Symbol (sixth type in ES6).

Don't worry if you don't understand what is ES5 and what is ES6 right now. They will be covered in the module on Advanced JavaScript. For now, just know that they are different versions of JavaScript language which lay different syntax and semantic rules for the language. Also, in this module, we'll be covering the first five datatypes only.

An important point to remember is that all the datatypes in JavaScript are declared using the var keyword. This means that you can declare a variable of any type using the var keyword.

Let's start with the string type. A string value in JavaScript is enclosed within single or double quotes.

"Srishti"
'123'
"@!#"
'Srishti@123'

All of the above are valid strings. Just make sure to use the same kind of closing quote as you do for the opening quote. This means that if you used a single quote as the opening quote, use the same as the closing quote. Similarly, if you used double quotes as the opening quotes, use the same as the closing quotes.

In the next video, let’s learn about what happens when you do not follow the rule of using the similar kind of opening & closing quotes.

So you saw the problem that Srishti told about in the last video, in which the empty string "" in the beginning was treated as one string and the string " is an e-learning platform." is another string. The string "UpGrad" was left out, which is why you get to see a syntax error. Let’s see in the next video how to solve this problem.

In the last video, you learned about escape sequences. These are useful in escaping the problem when one kind of quotes are included inside other kinds of quotes. You also learned about the newline character (\n) that helps in jumping to a new line.