JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 7th Edition

Chapter 11. The JavaScript Standard Library

Some datatypes, such as numbers and strings (Chapter 3), objects (Chapter 6), and arrays (Chapter 7) are so fundamental to JavaScript that we can consider them to be part of the language itself. This chapter covers other important but less fundamental APIs that can be thought of as defining the “standard library” for JavaScript: these are useful classes and functions that are built in to JavaScript and available to all JavaScript programs in both web browsers and in Node.¹

The sections of this chapter are independent of one another, and you can read them in any order. They cover:

• The Set and Map classes for representing sets of values and mappings from one set of values to another set of values.

• Array-like objects known as TypedArrays that represent arrays of binary data, along with a related class for extracting values from non-array binary data.

• Regular expressions and the RegExp class, which define textual patterns and are useful for text processing. This section also covers regular expression syntax in detail.

• The Date class for representing and manipulating dates and times.

• The Error class and its various subclasses, instances of which are thrown when errors occur in JavaScript programs.

• The JSON object, whose methods support serialization and deserialization of JavaScript data structures composed of objects, arrays, strings, numbers, and booleans.

• The Intl object and the classes it defines that can help you localize ...