Is it risky to ask for a nonexistent javascript argument?

If I have a function

foo()

that I call with no arguments most of the time, but one argument in special cases, is

var arg1 = arguments[0];
if (arg1) {
 开发者_JAVA技巧    <special case code>
}

inside the function a completely safe thing to do?

---

Yes it is safe. Unless you pass in false, "", 0, null or undefined as an argument. It's better to check againts the value of undefined. (If you pass in undefined then tough! that's not a valid argument).

There are 3 popular checks

• foo === undefined : Standard check but someone (evil) might do window.undefined = true
• typeof foo !== "undefined" : Checks for type and is safe.
• foo === void 0 : void 0 returns the real undefined

But this is prefered

function myFunction(foo) {
  if (foo !== undefined) {
    ...
  } else {
    ...
  }
}

---

Yes, that's fine. A reasonable alternative is to name the argument, and not use the arguments object:

function foo(specialArg)
{
    if (specialArg)
    {
        // special case code
    }
}

Note that if(bar) tests the truthiness of bar. If you call foo with any falsy value, such asfoo(0), foo(false), foo(null), etc., the special case code will not execute in the above function (or your original function, for that matter). You can change the test to

if (typeof specialArg !=== 'undefined')
{
    // ...
}

to make sure that the special case code is executed when the argument is supplied but falsy.

---

You can do this:

function foo(arg1){

 if (arg1){
   // Special case
 }
 else{
  // No argument

 }
 // Rest of function
}

---

As long as you document the behaviour sufficiently I don't see anything wrong with it.

However you'd be better off checking the argument length, as opposed to how you're doing it now. Say for example you called:

myFunction(0);

It will never process the argument.

If it's a single optional argument you may be better off having it as a named argument in the function and checking if a defined value was passed in, depends on your use case.

---

The basic fact you are interested in is "was foo called with 0 or 1 argument(s)?". So I would test arguments.length to avoid future problems with a special argument that evaluates to false.