How to check a not-defined variable in JavaScript

Question

I wanted to check whether the variable is defined or not. For example, the following throws a not-defined error

alert( x );

How can I cat

Answer 1

The error is telling you that x doesn’t even exist! It hasn’t been declared, which is different than being assigned a value.

var x; // declaration
x = 2; // assignment

If you declared x, you wouldn’t get an error. You would get an alert that says undefined because x exists/has been declared but hasn’t been assigned a value.

To check if the variable has been declared, you can use typeof, any other method of checking if a variable exists will raise the same error you got initially.

if(typeof x  !==  "undefined") {
    alert(x);
}

This is checking the type of the value stored in x. It will only return undefined when x hasn’t been declared OR if it has been declared and was not yet assigned.

Answer 2

The void operator returns undefined for any argument/expression passed to it. so you can test against the result (actually some minifiers change your code from undefined to void 0 to save a couple of characters)

For example:

void 0
// undefined

if (variable === void 0) {
    // variable is undefined
}

Answer 3

The only way to truly test if a variable is undefined is to do the following. Remember, undefined is an object in JavaScript.

if (typeof someVar === 'undefined') {
  // Your variable is undefined
}

Some of the other solutions in this thread will lead you to believe a variable is undefined even though it has been defined (with a value of NULL or 0, for instance).

Answer 4

I've often done:

function doSomething(variable)
{
    var undef;

    if(variable === undef)
    {
         alert('Hey moron, define this bad boy.');
    }
}

Answer 5

Just do something like below:

function isNotDefined(value) {
  return typeof value === "undefined";
}

and call it like:

isNotDefined(undefined); //return true
isNotDefined('Alireza'); //return false

Answer 6

The accepted answer is correct. Just wanted to add one more option. You also can use try ... catch block to handle this situation. A freaky example:

var a;
try {
    a = b + 1;  // throws ReferenceError if b is not defined
} 
catch (e) {
    a = 1;      // apply some default behavior in case of error
}
finally {
    a = a || 0; // normalize the result in any case
}

Be aware of catch block, which is a bit messy, as it creates a block-level scope. And, of course, the example is extremely simplified to answer the asked question, it does not cover best practices in error handling ;).