JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Variable Declaration

Before you use a variable in a JavaScript program, you should declare it. Variables are declared with the var keyword, like this:

var i;
var sum;

You can also declare multiple variables with the same var keyword:

var i, sum;

And you can combine variable declaration with variable initialization:

var message = "hello";
var i = 0, j = 0, k = 0;

If you don’t specify an initial value for a variable with the var statement, the variable is declared, but its value is undefined until your code stores a value into it.

Note that the var statement can also appear as part of the for and for/in loops (introduced in Chapter 5), allowing you to succinctly declare the loop variable as part of the loop syntax itself. For example:

for(var i = 0; i < 10; i++) console.log(i);
for(var i = 0, j=10; i < 10; i++,j--) console.log(i*j);
for(var p in o) console.log(p);

If you’re used to statically typed languages such as C or Java, you will have noticed that there is no type associated with JavaScript’s variable declarations. A JavaScript variable can hold a value of any type. For example, it is perfectly legal in JavaScript to assign a number to a variable and then later assign a string to that variable:

var i = 10;
i = "ten";

Repeated and Omitted Declarations

It is legal and harmless to declare a variable more than once with the var statement. If the repeated declaration has an initializer, it acts as if it were simply an assignment statement.

If you attempt to read the value of an undeclared variable, ...