In any programming project, you will find yourself working with data. Data can come in many forms. It is vital to understand the different data types and how each of them work/are used.
The most often used data types are:
- Text/String
- Number/Integer
- Boolean (yes/no, true/false, on/off)
Some others you will run across are Arrays, Objects and Undefined/Null.
I will attempt to define each of these for you over the next several blog posts. I will be utilizing JavaScript examples, but the types are language agnostic. While there may be nuanced differences, all languages use these or similar data types.
Allow me to start with Text/String…
[code lang=”js”]
var firstText = "I am the first text value";
document.write(firstText);
[/code]
The above code would result in the following sentence displaying on your screen…
I am the first text value
What we did is create a variable (the var keyword) entitled firstText. We then instantiated that by storing a text/string value in the variable. This allows us to work with that variable throughout our code however we need.
Note: JavaScript is a loosely typed language. What this means is the following code would work just fine…
[code lang=”js”]
var firstText = "I am the first text value";
document.writeln(firstText);
firstText = 10;
document.write(firstText);
[/code]
The above code would display in the following manner…
I am the first text value
10
So, as you can see, JavaScript does not balk that we changed the variable firstText from a string value to a numeric value. Other languages (C# for example) are strictly typed. In other words, the aforementioned code would not work in a strictly typed language. It would throw an error.
Let me know if you have any questions and happy coding!
Clay
