Canonical Url: https://ganes.dev/nullish-coalescing-and-optional-chaining/

In this post, I'll explain about two of the recent additions to the javascript. Nullish Coalescing and Optional Chaining.

Nullish Coalescing

When accessing a property of a object in javascript, we usually provide a fallback value incase the property is not present (undefined) or null.

For Example. Consider a object like this

const Blog = {
  showPost: false,
  blogTitle: 'A new Post',
  animationDuration: 0,
  blogSubTitle: '',
  nullVal: null,
};

A usual way for this handle fallback is by using the || operator

const undefinedValue = Blog.someValue || 'default value'; // result: default value
const nullValue = Blog.nullVal || 'some other default value'; // result: some other default value

// Other Cases
const showPost = Blog.showPost || true; // expected: false, result: true
const postAnimationDuration = Blog.animationDuration || 400; // expected: 0, result: 400
const blogSubtitle = Blog.blogSubTitle || 'Subtitle'; // expected: '', result: Subtitle

The first two examples work as we expected, but for other cases we get the result as right hand side value of || operator as shown in the above example.This is because the values on left hand side already evaluate to falsy in Javascript.

For this problem, we use the Nullish Coalescing operator

const showPost = Blog.showPost ?? true; // expected: false, result: false
const postAnimationDuration = Blog.animationDuration ?? 400; // expected: 0, result: 0
const blogSubtitle = Blog.blogSubTitle ?? 'Subtitle'; // expected: '', result: ''

Once we switch to nullish Coalescing, we get the expected results.

Optional Chaining

When accessing a nested property in the object, we usually have to check whether intermediate properties are present.

For Example, Consider a object with nested properties like this

const Person = {
  name:'Ganesh'
  address:{
    home:'Home Address',
    work:'Work Address'
  }
}

const homeAddress = Person.address.home

Since, we are accessing nested values, if address is undefined we get an error like Cannot read property home of undefined. In this case, we use Optional Chaining operator.

To use the optional chaining operator, we have to put a ? before accessing a property. So above example changes to this

const homeAddress = Person?.address?.home;

// We can also use this for functions
someObj?.func();

Combining both of them

Although these both operators are good seperately, when combined they become very useful.
I can take the sample example and nullish coalescing operator at the end of it.

// The result defaults to Home if left side of nullish coalescing is null (or) undefined.
const homeAddress = Person?.address?.home ?? 'Home';