Improved typeof detection for node, Deno, and the browser.
| Supported Browsers | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | 9, 10, 11 | |
What is Type-Detect?
Type Detect is a module which you can use to detect the type of a given object. It returns a string representation of the object's type, either using typeof or @@toStringTag. It also normalizes some object names for consistency among browsers.
Why?
The typeof operator will only specify primitive values; everything else is "object" (including null, arrays, regexps, etc). Many developers use Object.prototype.toString() - which is a fine alternative and returns many more types (null returns [object Null], Arrays as [object Array], regexps as [object RegExp] etc).
Sadly, Object.prototype.toString is slow, and buggy. By slow - we mean it is slower than typeof. By buggy - we mean that some values (like Promises, the global object, iterators, dataviews, a bunch of HTML elements) all report different things in different browsers.
type-detect fixes all of the shortcomings with Object.prototype.toString. We have extra code to speed up checks of JS and DOM objects, as much as 20-30x faster for some values. type-detect also fixes any consistencies with these objects.
Installation
Node.js
type-detect is available on npm. To install it, type:
$ npm install type-detect
Deno
type-detect can be imported with the following line:
import type from 'https://deno.land/x/[email protected]/index.ts'
Browsers
You can also use it within the browser; install via npm and use the type-detect.js file found within the download. For example:
<script src="./node_modules/type-detect/type-detect.js"></script>
Usage
The primary export of type-detect is function that can serve as a replacement for typeof. The results of this function will be more specific than that of native typeof.
var type = require('type-detect');
Or, in the browser use case, after the