How do you check that a number is NaN in JavaScript?

Question

I’ve only been trying it in Firefox’s JavaScript console, but neither of the following statements return true:

parseFloat(\'geoff\') == NaN;

parseFloat(\'ge         


        

Answer 1

NaN in JavaScript stands for "Not A Number", although its type is actually number.

typeof(NaN) // "number"

To check if a variable is of value NaN, we cannot simply use function isNaN(), because isNaN() has the following issue, see below:

var myVar = "A";
isNaN(myVar) // true, although "A" is not really of value NaN

What really happens here is that myVar is implicitly coerced to a number:

var myVar = "A";
isNaN(Number(myVar)) // true. Number(myVar) is NaN here in fact

It actually makes sense, because "A" is actually not a number. But what we really want to check is if myVar is exactly of value NaN.

So isNaN() cannot help. Then what should we do instead?

In the light that NaN is the only JavaScript value that is treated unequal to itself, so we can check for its equality to itself using !==

var myVar; // undefined
myVar !== myVar // false

var myVar = "A";
myVar !== myVar // false

var myVar = NaN
myVar !== myVar // true

So to conclude, if it is true that a variable !== itself, then this variable is exactly of value NaN:

function isOfValueNaN(v) {
    return v !== v;
}

var myVar = "A";
isNaN(myVar); // true
isOfValueNaN(myVar); // false