Question

In Chrome, the following

console.log(true, '\t');

will print

true "  "

Why are there quotes hanging around?

(Notice that console.log(true + '', '\t') will only print true, in the same way that console.log('a', '\t'); will only print a.)

Answer 1

Basically there are two overloads to console.log:

console.log(formatString, args) and console.log(arg1, arg2, ...).

More specifically, per the source code, if the first parameter is a string then it treats it as a format string for the other parameters. Otherwise, each parameter is output directly.

Thus console.log(true + '', '\t') outputs ‘true’ because the first parameter is a string and there is no placeholder for the \t, and console.log(true, '\t') will output both parameters because true is not a string.