1️⃣ Complete guide to Numbers in JavaScript

Table of content:

• Introduction to Number
• How to get access to Number.prototype
• How to check that a number is integer
• Is floating point math broken?
• Not a number, number
• Special values
• Bitwise operators

Introduction to Number

Number - is a numeric data type, that represents both integer and fractional numbers. In JavaScript numbers is based on the floating-point standard ("IEEE 754"). Size of each value is 64-bit.

(!Advanced section, you can skip for first reading)

Representation schema is located below:

Due to representation, highest integer value without losing precision is 2^53 - 1 (look at the size of mantissa), starts from ES6 you can get this value using Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER.

The maximum floating-point value that can be represented is roughly 1.798e+308 (Number.MAX_VALUE), minimum - 5e-324 (Number.MIN_VALUE)

Infinity and NaN are also encoded in the mantissa – with 2047 as an exponent. If the mantissa is 0, it is a positive or negative Infinity. If it is not, then it is a NaN.

How to get access to Number.prototype

There are a lot of useful methods on the prototype of Number, but how to get access to them? When are you use a variable it’s pretty easy, with number literals it’s more tricky. Let’s consiter a toFixed method (returns a string with specified number of fractional decimal places) as example:

const a = 5.37
a.toFixed(0)  // '5'
a.toFixed(1)  // '5.4'
a.toFixed(2)  // '5.37'
a.toFixed(3)  // '5.370'

To use it with number literals you have to wrap them with brackets or use extra point as far as the first point symbol specified for separating a fractional part:

5.toFixed(2)   // SyntaxError: Invalid or unexpected token
(5).toFixed(2) // '5.00'
5.2.toFixed(2) // '5.20'
5..toFixed(2)  // '5.00', also, you can use two point symbols one after another

Note: for both cases engine automatically coerced numbers to a Number object to get access to the method from Number.prototype.

How to check that a number is an integer

The old good way is checking for a remainder when dividing by 1. But with ES6 you can use Number.isInteger method:

Number.isInteger(5)    // true
Number.isInteger(-0.5) // false 

Is floating point math broken?

Now we gotta consider one of the most popular interview question about numbers:

0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3 // false

What is the reason? Is it a JavaScript fail? Nope, it’s expected behavior for all of the programming languages based on "IEEE 754" standard. Let’s figure out why. For calculation that statement needs to convert numbers to binary64 format, and here’s the main source of issues - representation can’t be exactly in all cases (you can think about it as about 1/3 in decimal system), so sometimes it has some errors, that can change the output result, for 0.1 + 0.2 it will be - 0.30000000000000004

(To fix that issue you can use some multiplicator for that values and after operation divide on that multiplicator).

Not a number, number

JavaScript has spesial value for falled numeric operations - NaN. It means that is result was got invalid/failed number, like following examples:

"foo" - 2  // NaN
"bar" * 5  // NaN
7 / "baz"  // NaN
typeof NaN // 'number'

The most interesting characteristic of NaN is that NaN never equal to another value:

NaN === NaN // false
NaN !== NaN // true

For checking on a NaN value you have to use a isNaN function:

isNaN(NaN) // true

Special values

As we’ve mentioned in the advanced section of introduction part, there are some other special values besides the NaN:

• Infinity
• -Infinity
• -0

Examples with special values:

1 / 0	 // Infinity
-1 / 0	 // -Infinity
0 / -1   // -0
-2 * 0   // -0
-0 === 0 // true
-0 < 0   // false

Bitwise operators

In that section, we’ll skip introduction part about bitwise operators (at least you have to know that it’s an operator which operates over binary data).

The main that you have to know about that operator in the context of numbers or integers, that all of them works with int32 data type, so values are limited with 32 bits (values range from -2^31 to 2^31 - 1) instead of 52 bits that can be used for max integer in JavaScript.

In result’s all operation’s that in result overflow the 32 bits will return wrong values. You have to remember about it when you use the bitwise operator for any purpose. In most cases the issues arise when you use it for pretty rounding an so on:

const MAX_32_INTEGER = Math.pow(2, 31) - 1 // 2147483647
MAX_32_INTEGER.toString(2) // 1111111111111111111111111111111
const floatValueLessMax32 = MAX_32_INTEGER - 0.5 // 2147483646.5
const floatValueMoreMax32 = MAX_32_INTEGER + 1.5 // 2147483648.5
// Bitwise Or, that with 0 returns integer part of the number
floatValueLessMax32 | 0 // 2147483646
floatValueMoreMax32 | 0 // -2147483648