Question

I just ran one script through JSlint and received tons of errors – all related to the example below. Now I need to clear some basics, as I’m honestly pretty new to JS and don’t know if those are “critical” Errors, Warnings or notices.

var whatEver = {
    foo:         null,
    fooArray:    [],
    // This tells me that the curly bracket was expected much earlier
    barArray:
    {
         whatever:    'somestring'
        ,keyTwo:      'anotherstring'
    },
    // Here I get told that I got "wrong" white spaces
    bar:         document.getElementById( 'someID' )
};

I know most of this is “basic” js stuff and so far everything’s working fine. I just want to know if I’m making basic mistakes.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here is some feedback:

1. It’s not that normal to have a lot of whitespace after property names. Maybe it’s a copy/paste problem.
2. Objects as shown by the {} are not arrays, FYI. SO you might not wants to call them arrays. You can make an array literal by using [], if that’s what you want.
3. document.getElementById( ‘someID’ ); should NOT have a semi-colon at the end. That’s your biggest mistake.
4. You sometimes use comma-before syntax and sometimes use comma-after. You could probably just stick with one. Personally, most of my JS is in node and comma-before is pretty normal there. Either works though. http://css-tricks.com/7741-commas-before/
5. I put this in my code example, but didn’t mention it up here. Braces should always be on the line with the parent. This is because of automatic semi-colon insertion, which can screw you up if you put a return on the line before {}. See: http://robertnyman.com/2008/10/16/beware-of-javascript-semicolon-insertion/. Thanks Michael for mentioning it below!

Here’s what I’d go with. http://jsfiddle.net/n87Cn/ JSLINT doens’t like it, but I think it’s quite nice.