Tricky Javascript Interview Questions

Being great developer has nothing to do with passing interview, because most interviews are about weird questions, like what are your weaknesses and question about the legacy feature of a language which nobody hasn’t used in 10 years. Nevertheless, we have to play the game by the rules.

#0 Tricky Function Call

What is the output in the console?

Answer

The answer is 30.25. The trick is, if you put parentheses with arguments immediately after function declaration, that will be considered a function call.

#1 Fat Arrow + Declaration Overlap

What is the output in the console?

Answer

The answer is 1. The trick is that due to duplicate declaration of b as variable and parameter, it gets resolved as parameter. Since we call our function only with 1 parameter – 1 + [] equals '1'. Pay attention that type of returned value is string.

#2 Variable and Function Names Overlap

What is the output in the console?

Answer

Output will be [10], 10, [10], 10. The key is to understand that in case of variable and parameter names war – parameter wins. There are a few other tricks here. arguments is always an array and in this case it is [10]. ...f is a way to group the rest of the function parameters into named array, in this case all the parameters are resulting into [10].

#3 Variable Scope

What is the output in the console?

Answer

There are two tricks here. First — executing code using function scope — (function(){}()) pattern. Second – exploiting global/local scope overlap. Both foo and bar defined in global scope. Function redefines foo in local scope, so global foo is not changed, when bar gets reassigned to 1. Finally, 1 + 10 = 11.

#4 Global + Local

What is the output in the console?

Answer

This will print out undefined and 10 rather than 5 and 10 since JavaScript always moves variable declarations (not initializations) to the top of the scope, making the code equivalent to:

#5 Chained Assignment

What is the output in the console?

Answer

This will print out undefined and number rather than number and number since var a = b = 3 is equivalent to b = 3; var a = b;. Making b global variable. What is usage of chained notation is not recommended by many styles to avoid accidental global variable declarations.

#6 Auto Semicolon

What is the output in the console?

Answer

This will print out object and undefined. Javascript has automatic semicolon insertion and one of them is inserting semicolon after return statement, making second function equal to return;, thus returning undefined.

#7 Javascript Number

What is the output in the console?

Answer

Most likely it will output 0.30000000000000004, false, and true. Number in JS are represented as double-precision 64-bit binary format IEEE 754 values. Thus there are rounding errors, as well as there is Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER, after which Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER === Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER + 1 equals to true.

#8 Object Keys

What is the output in the console?

Answer

This will print out 333, not 111. When setting an object property, JavaScript will implicitly stringify the parameter value. In this case, since b and c are both objects, they will both be converted to "[object Object]". As a result, a[b] anda[c] are both equivalent to a["[object Object]"] and can be used interchangeably. Thus, setting or referencing a[c] is precisely the same as setting or referencing a[b].

#9 setTimeout Loops

What is the output in the console?

Answer

This will print out 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 and 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.

setTimeout function will be called after whole cycle is executed because of JavaScript event queue. Variables declared using var are global by default – meaning i would be equal to 5 after the end of a cycle. Since all setTimeout functions are called after the cycle, the all would print 5.

Output of second loop even more bizarre. In ECMA 6 specification, the specified behaviour is that in for(let i;;){} i gets a new binding for every iteration of the loop. Essentially each closure inside a loop gets a different instance of i

#10 Chained Relationals

What is the output in the console?

Answer

This will print out true and false. There are two tricks here. In Javascript relational operators evaluated from left to right, false equals 0, and true equals 1 for number comparisons. First expression after first step is true < 2 => 1 < 2 => true, and second is true > 1 => 1 > 1 => false.

TL; DR;

Javascript has many interview traps, so unless you prepare for them or have memorized ECMA specifications you are likely to fail at an interview at some point.

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Originally published at ylv.io on February 10, 2019.