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JavaScript JavaScript Basics (Retired) Making Decisions with Conditional Statements Build a Random Number Guessing Game

Zach Patrick
Zach Patrick
19,209 Points
Posted by Zach Patrick
Zach Patrick
19,209 Points

Is there anything wrong with putting the parseInt() function in the var like this...

Is there anything wrong with putting the parseInt() function in the var like this...

var guess = parseInt(prompt("I am thinking of a number between 1 and 6. What is it?"));

rather than constantly repeating it in your code?

Thanks

3 Answers

Justin Horner
STAFF
Justin Horner
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Justin Horner
Justin Horner
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Hello Zach,

While it is certainly possibly to do that technically, I would say that you do want to be mindful of readability over time.

While this is a simple example of nested method calls, too many that end up too long is generally something professional developers avoid. Not always, but in most cases.

Just to give an example: Usually I would see that being broken out this way.

var guessPrompt = prompt("I am thinking of a number between 1 and 6. What is it?");
var guess = parseInt(guessPrompt);

The value of each line representing its concern separately becomes even more valuable when you begin error handling where you want to isolate one particular function of work to handle exceptions.

I hope this helps.

Zach Patrick
Zach Patrick
19,209 Points
Zach Patrick
Zach Patrick
19,209 Points

Thank's Justin! That does help!

Dan Oswalt
Dan Oswalt
23,438 Points
Dan Oswalt
Dan Oswalt
23,438 Points

You can certainly do it that way, not sure what the exercise you're looking at is doing otherwise, but that's how I'd do it.

Gunhoo Yoon
Gunhoo Yoon
5,027 Points
Gunhoo Yoon
Gunhoo Yoon
5,027 Points

That's a good way to handle integer input but remember to specify the radix for consistent output. Although, it doesn't default to octal like it's used to (at least it seems to be but could be different for legacy browsers.) just put it there for human readers and your safety.

var guess = parseInt(prompt("I am thinking of a number between 1 and 6. What is it?"), 10);

That way you always end up with decimal number or NaN and you can use isNaN() to determine insane inputs.