Empty statement
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
An empty statement is used to provide no statement, although the JavaScript syntax would expect one.
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Syntax
;
Description
The empty statement is a semicolon (;
) indicating that no statement will
be executed, even if JavaScript syntax requires one.
The opposite behavior, where you want multiple statements, but JavaScript only allows a single one, is possible using a block statement, which combines several statements into a single one.
Examples
Empty loop body
The empty statement is sometimes used with loop statements. See the following example with an empty loop body:
const arr = [1, 2, 3];
// Assign all array values to 0
for (let i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 0) /* empty statement */ ;
console.log(arr);
// [0, 0, 0]
Unintentional usage
It is a good idea to comment intentional use of the empty statement, as it is not really obvious to distinguish from a normal semicolon.
In the following example, the usage is probably not intentional:
if (condition); // Caution, this "if" does nothing!
killTheUniverse(); // So this always gets executed!!!
Specifications
Specification |
---|
ECMAScript Language Specification # sec-empty-statement |
Browser compatibility
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