Javascript “Cannot read property 'length' of undefined” when checking a variable's length

Question

I\'m building a node scraper that uses cheerio to parse the DOM. This is more or a vanilla javascript question though. At one part of

Answer 1

If you aren't doing some kind of numeric comparison of the length property, it's better not to use it in the if statement, just do:

if(theHref){
   // do stuff
}else{
  // do other stuff
}

An empty (or undefined, as it is in this case) string will evaluate to false (just like a length of zero would.)