Javascript : assign variable in if condition statement, good practice or not?

Posted by Michael Mao on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Michael Mao
Published on 2010-04-05T01:49:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 1:53 UTC
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Hi all:

I moved one years ago from classic OO languages such like Java to Javascript. The following code is definitely not recommended (or even not correct) in Java:

if(dayNumber = getClickedDayNumber(dayInfo))
{
    alert("day number found");
}
function getClickedDayNumber(dayInfo)
{
    dayNumber = dayInfo.indexOf("fc-day");
    if(dayNumber != -1) //substring found
    {
        //normally any calendar month consists of "40" days, so this will definitely pick up its day number.
        return parseInt(dayInfo.substring(dayNumber+6, dayNumber+8));
    }
    else return false;
}

Basically I just found out that I can assign a variable to a value in an if condition statement, and immediately check the assigned value as if it is boolean.

For a safer bet, I usually separate that into two lines of code, assign first then check the variable, but now that I found this, I am just wondering whether is it good practice or not in the eyes of experienced javascript developers?

Many thanks in advance.

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