Some tricky JavaScript concepts that you might encounter in an interview

2 min readMay 7, 2021

Truthy vs Falsy Values

In JavaScript, when used inside a condition, a value is considered to be truthy if it yields in a true condition. Otherwise it is regarded as a falsy value. There are some fixed falsy values in JS: false, 0, -0, ‘’, null, undefined and NaN.

Double equal(==) vs Triple equal(===)

There is a subtle difference between ‘==’ and ‘===’ equal in JS. When used ‘==’, it only compares whether two values are equal or not. It doesn’t check the data type. For example, if string ‘1’ and number 1 are compared with ‘==’, it will return true. It automatically converts the string ‘1’ to a number data type. But this is not the case for ‘===’. Here both value and data types are compared. Hence, for the same previous example, the returned result will be false for ‘===’.

Null and Undefined

In JS, undefined is considered as a data type and null is considered as an object. That is, when we define a variable, but do not assign any value to it, we get undefined. On the other hand, we can set null as a value to any variable.

let demo;
console.log(demo); //shows undefined
console.log(typeof demo); //shows undefinedlet demo = null;
console.log(demo); //shows null
console.log(typeof demo); //shows object

Finding the largest element in an array

let arr = [1,5,77,22,5,7,83,34,91,3];
let maxValue = arr[0];
for (let i = 0; i< arr.length; i++){
    if(arr[i] > maxValue){
        maxValue = arr[i];
    }
}
console.log(maxValue);
//should print out '91'

Removing duplicate item from an array

let arr = [1,5,77,22,5,7,93,22,34,1,77,91,3];
let  newArr = [];
for (let i = 0; i< arr.length; i++){
    if(!newArr.includes(arr[i])) {
        newArr.push(arr[i]);
       }
   }
console.log(newArr);
//expected output:'[1,5,77,22,7,93,34,91,3]'

Counting the number of words in a string

let str = 'My name is wreet';
const arr = str.split(' ');
console.log(arr.length);
//expected output: '4'

Reverse a string

let str = 'My name is wreet';
let reversedStr = '';
for(let i = str.length-1; i >= 0; i--){
    reversedStr += str[i];
}
console.log(reversedStr);
//expected output: 'teerw si eman yM'

Finding factorial of a number

function factorial(n){
  let count = 1;
  for(let i=1; i<=n; i++){
    count *= i;
  }
  return count;
}
console.log(factorial(3));
//expected output: '6'

Finding factorial of a number using recursion

function factorial(n){
  if(n ===1){
    return 1;
  }else{
    return n * factorial(n-1)
  }  
}
console.log(factorial(5));
//expected output : '120'