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articles/snippets/javascript-numeric-separator.md

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+---
+title: JavaScript's numeric separators explained
+shortTitle: Numeric separators explained
+type: story
+tags: [javascript,math,type]
+author: chalarangelo
+cover: coffee-drip
+excerpt: Numeric separators are a somewhat lesser-known JavaScript syntactic sugar that can make working with large constants a lot easier.
+dateModified: 2021-06-27T05:00:00-04:00
+---
+
+Numeric separators are a lesser-known JavaScript syntactic sugar that can make working with numeric constants a lot easier. The long and short of it is that you can add underscores (`_`) to numeric values to make them more readable.
+
+The idea of separating large numeric values with a special character might sound familiar on account of it being a syntax present in multiple other languages, such as Java, Python, Ruby etc. From what I can tell, numeric separators are at their best when creating shared constants that will not change and are very large, have many repeated digits and/or can be ambiguous.
+
+Apart from readability, numeric separators don't really offer anything else. For the sceptics among us that don't really see a lot of readability value either, I'd like to show two rather convincing sample cases:
+
+```js
+// How many zeroes is that? Millions? Billions? Trillions?
+const msInOneYear = 31536000000;
+// Is this 4,200 or 42.00 (in cents)?
+const price = 4200;
+
+// Ok, this is approximately 31.5 billion
+const msInOneYear = 31_536_000_000;
+// Based on the separator, this should be 42.00 (cents)
+const price = 42_00;
+```
+
+Finally, as far as caveats go, you only need to remember that numbers cannot start or end with a numeric separator and that you can't have two or more numeric separators in a row.