Hi there, quick question. I am reading a book about javascript and the author doesn't seem to like quotes ("") at all, but he loves angled brackets (<<>>). what really strikes me is that it looks like he uses them instead of quotes. FOr example I would say: alert("Hello WOrld!"); and he instead goes alert(<<Hello World!>>); .
It is the first time I see angled brackets used instead of quotes,I am a bit confused, so I looked at Crockford's conventions but actually he doesn't say anything about that.
What do you guys think? Is it ok to use <<>> and "" interchangeably?
thanks

Try it and find out. Report your findings.

Member Avatar for stbuchok

What book is this out of? You can not use angle brackets in place of quotes.

Try it:

<html>
<head>
<title>
</title>

<script>

alert(<<Quote>>);

</script>

<body>
</body>
</html>

Then switch the angle brackets to quotes, and see what happens. I have always used the single quotes for strings in JavaScript. I also always use double quotes for HTML. This way, when creating a string in JavaScript that has HTML, you do not need to escape the quotes.

Sounds like a typesetting error by the book's publishers.

Some natural languages (eg. Greek, Russian) use angled quotes but, as far as I know, no computer languages - certainly not js.

Airshow

hi thanks all for that.
Perhaps it is a typesetting error as airshow said but it is recurrent...I tried as suggested to replace the quotes with angled brackets and the script doesn't work. I will ask directly to the author, I have no idea what's going on. The book by the way is called "javascript and ajax for dummies" by Andy Harris
thanks

They are probably equivalent to the « ( &#38;#171; ) and » ( &#38;#187; ) characters. If I correctly recall my high school Spanish classes from 30-odd years back, Spanish also uses them.

(Unexpectedly, DaniWeb or *something* processes the HTML character codes, so you get to see them. Also unexpectedly, they get translated to the real characters during a preview.)

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