Baseline Widely available
The String()
constructor creates String
objects. When called as a function, it returns primitive values of type String.
new String(thing)
String(thing)
Note: String()
can be called with or without new
, but with different effects. See Return value.
thing
Anything to be converted to a string.
When String()
is called as a function (without new
), it returns value
coerced to a string primitive. Specially, Symbol values are converted to "Symbol(description)"
, where description
is the description of the Symbol, instead of throwing.
When String()
is called as a constructor (with new
), it coerces value
to a string primitive (without special symbol handling) and returns a wrapping String
object, which is not a primitive.
Warning: You should rarely find yourself using String
as a constructor.
String function and String constructor produce different results:
const a = new String("Hello world"); // a === "Hello world" is false
const b = String("Hello world"); // b === "Hello world" is true
a instanceof String; // is true
b instanceof String; // is false
typeof a; // "object"
typeof b; // "string"
Here, the function produces a string (the primitive type) as promised. However, the constructor produces an instance of the type String (an object wrapper) and that's why you rarely want to use the String constructor at all.
Using String() to stringify a symbolString()
is the only case where a symbol can be converted to a string without throwing, because it's very explicit.
const sym = Symbol("example");
`${sym}`; // TypeError: Cannot convert a Symbol value to a string
"" + sym; // TypeError: Cannot convert a Symbol value to a string
"".concat(sym); // TypeError: Cannot convert a Symbol value to a string
const sym = Symbol("example");
String(sym); // "Symbol(example)"
Specifications Browser compatibility See also
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