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JavaScript JavaScript Basics Making Decisions in Your Code with Conditional Statements Program Multiple Outcomes

Posted by Jessica Perry
Jessica Perry
2,688 Points

Teacher notes Question: What does the "+" in +guessMore (+guessLess etc..) variable mean?

When going thru the teachers notes I noticed that in the code there was a + in front of the variables guess, guessMore, and guessLess. Can you explain why we would put a + in front of the variable name?

1 Answer

Mark Sebeck
MOD
Mark Sebeck
Treehouse Moderator 37,905 Points
Mark Sebeck
Mark Sebeck
Treehouse Moderator 37,905 Points

Hi Jessica. The plus (+) sign is the Unary Plus Operator in Javascript. It attempts to convert the variable to a number. Because we are reading from a prompt the input the user enters will be a string. We want to convert in to a number before comparing it with the correct guess. You can read more about the Unary Plus Operator here. Hope this helps Jessica and good luck on your coding journey.

Jessica Perry
Jessica Perry
2,688 Points

This does help! Thank you so much for your answer. I have moved on in the track to "Converting strings to Numbers". I wanted to ask if this was a shorthand way of converting a string to a number vs the parseInt()?