Types in Typescript - Primitive Values

I recently joined a new company that uses TypeScript in both front end (React) and backend (Node/Lambda functions) so I decided to write a few articles of my journey in re-learning TypeScript.

To be completely open, I’m not new to TypeScript as I used it for 4 years when I was working with Angular 4. However, I had a two years break from it as in my former company TypeScript wasn’t part of the tech stack.

For this reason, I decided to start from the basis and have a deep dive in TypeScript to refresh my knowledge. This series of article is going to be a summary of my findings and understandings and I hope it’ll be a good summary for whomever wishes to starts using TypeScript.

There are several types in TypeScript and we’ll divided them in categories and start to look at each one in a progressive order and hopefully this will help in understand them a little bit better.

Any Type

All types in Typescript are a subtype of the any type. The any type represent any JavaScript value, without constrains.

For a more in-depth analysis of the type any and the new type unknown please check out my dedicated article

Primitive Types:

Let’s have a look at the other most-common types:

• boolean
• number
• bigint
• string
• enum
• void
• null

Boolean Type

If you have any basic experience of coding, you might be able to guess the values of this datatype. Boolean values can be either true or false

const x: boolean = true
const y: boolean = false;

String Type

Another easy type to remember is the string type, a sequence of Unicode UTF-16 code units, or simply, a piece of text surrounded by quotes.

const x = 'hello'
const z = "hi"
const y = ""

In TypeScript you can also use template strings, strings that can be embedded and that can span in multiple lines. To create a template string, you just need to surround it with backtick. On how to embed them, refer to the following example:

const greetings: string = 'meow meow'
const sentence: string = `At 5 am the cat said ${greetings}`

// At 5 am the cat said meow meow

const poem: string = `I wonder thro' each charter'd street
    Near where the charter'd Thames does flow`

// I wonder thro' each charter'd street
      Near where the charter'd Thames does flow

Number and bigint

In TypeScript, numbers are either floating points values or BigIntegers. Floating point values (number) are numbers without a fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point.

const x: number = 1
const y: number = 0.1
const z: number = 123.456

bigInt are numbers that are larger than 9007199254740991 (9 quadrillions) or `. In JavaScrip this limit can be retrieved using Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER`.

const bigNumber: bigint = 150n

Enum Type

enum is one of the most recent additions to the TypeScript types list and stands for enumeration. An enum is a set of values and you can use it to create a set of constants to be used with variables and properties. The behavior of enum is largely different compared with what we saw so far, so I’ll explain it in details in a future article

Void, null, undefined

These are primitive values but on their own do not make much sense. However, they are really useful alongside functions. So bare with me and we’ll discuss them later.

Object Types:

The remaining types, called object types, will be discussed in a future article.

• function
• object
• symbol
• undefined
• never