Question

I’m having some issues getting a proper boolean return on section 4.1 of Codecademy’s Javascript tutorial. Here is the code:

// Define quarter here.
var quarter = function(n) {
    if (n / 4 ){
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
};

if (quarter(4) === 1) {
  console.log("The statement is true.");
} else {
  console.log("The statement is false.");
}

From what I can see, I am passing the newly defined quarter variable a function with a parameter of ‘n’ that I then divide by 4 to see if it returns 1 for true, or 0 (else) for false. I then am using the ‘quarter’ function in an if loop to check for equality of 1 of the number ‘4’ passed as ‘n’.

I’m assuming this is some basic logic that I am just not used to using (as a front end developer looking to get into JavaScript programming) but I would definitely appreciate some thoughts and guidance.

Answer 1

In JavaScript, the constants true and false are not numbers; they’re a separate type.

Furthermore, you’re comparing with === and that will explicitly prevent type conversion during the comparison.

Note that n / 4 is going to be true (non-zero) for all values of “n” except 0 (edit you probably meant to use %). And in general, any construction of the form:

if (expression) {
  return true;
}
else {
  return false;
}

can be replaced by:

return !!(expression);

or, alternatively,

return Boolean(expression);