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This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all my web development learnings.

I've been sitting in Jeff Strauss' talk at KCDC on ES2017 and he mentioned a tiny detail about Array.prototype.includes I didn't think of before.

Let's say you have an array holding different types like ['foo', 123, true, undefined, NaN]. To figure out if a value is included in this array you could use indexOf and check if the result is -1.

This works fine for all the values except NaN, because NaN === NaN evaluates to false. You can't test if NaN an array includes NaN using indexOf.

['foo', 123, true, undefined, NaN].indexOf(NaN) // -1

Array.prototype.includes fixes this behavior. 🎉

['foo', 123, true, undefined, NaN].includes(NaN) // true
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Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, Tiny helpers maintainer, and DevRel at Checkly.