---
title: "Tip: React conditional className, empty strings and null"
type: tip
tags: react,components
authors: maciv
cover: blog_images/succulent-red-light.jpg
excerpt: When developing React components, you might often need to conditionally apply a className. Learn how to handle empty classNames correctly using this handy tip.
---

When developing React components, you often need to conditionally apply a `className` attribute to one or more elements. Sometimes, you will have two or more possible values depending on a condition, but there are also times that you might apply a `className` based on a condition or leave it completely empty otherwise.

However, there is a correct way to handle a conditional empty `className` and an incorrect one and there are many examples of handling this incorrectly all around the web. Consider the following example:

```jsx
const MyComponent = ({ enabled }) => {
  return ( <div className={enabled ? 'enabled' : ''}> Hi </div> );
};

const OtherComponent = ({ enabled }) => {
  return ( <div className={enabled ? 'enabled' : null}> Hi </div> );
};

ReactDOM.render(
  <>
    <MyComponent enabled={false} />
    <OtherComponent enabled={false} />
  </>,
  document.getElementById('root')
);
```

In the code example above, we create two very similar components, both of which conditionally set the `className` of an element based on the value of the `enabled` prop. The first one will set the `className` to an empty string if `enabled` is `false` and the second one will set it to `null`.

Both will result in a very similar output, however, if you carefully inspect the HTML, you will notice that the first one will render `<div class>Hi</div>` whereas the second one will render `<div>Hi</div>`. This kind of markup (an attribute being present but without value) is rather uncommon and you'd rarely ever see something like that without React. This subtle difference is quite important and might be the root of a lot of problems, especially when trying to select elements with/without any classes using CSS selectors (e.g. `[class]`/`:not([class])`).

Therefore, you should prefer `null` when you don't want to add a `className` to an element, instead of an empty string. It keeps the markup cleaner and might help prevent some potential issues.

**Image credit:** [Yousef Espanioly](https://unsplash.com/@yespanioly?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)