Question

In many situations, JavaScript parsers will insert semicolons for you if you leave them out. My question is, do you leave them out?

If you’re unfamiliar with the rules, there’s a description of semicolon insertion on the Mozilla site. Here’s the key point:

If the first through the n^th tokens of a JavaScript program form are grammatically valid but the first through the n+1^st tokens are not and there is a line break between the n^th tokens and the n+1^st tokens, then the parser tries to parse the program again after inserting a virtual semicolon token between the n^th and the n+1^st tokens.

That description may be incomplete, because it doesn’t explain @Dreas’s example. Anybody have a link to the complete rules, or see why the example gets a semicolon? (I tried it in JScript.NET.)

This stackoverflow question is related, but only talks about a specific scenario.

Answer 1

Yes, you should use semicolons after every statement in JavaScript.