What Does A Tilde Do In JavaScript?

It's not every day that you see a tilde in JavaScript.

I was taking a look through the source code for the Twit NPM library when I was creating a Twitter Bot and came across the following lines of code:

if(~followers.indexOf(target)) {
  // do some action
}

Notice the tilde on the first line? Let's find out what that's all about.

I discovered that when we use the ~ operator, it does -(A + 1) where A is the value to the right of the tilde. For example, we'd get -2 if we did this (since -(1 + 1) = -2):

~['apples', 'oranges'].indexOf('apples'); // => 0
~['apples', 'oranges'].indexOf('oranges'); // => -2

Maybe you're like me and you're not really seeing the usefulness of using tilde yet.

It turns out that it's actually useful for determining the truthiness of a numeric value. It flips all the bits in its operand.

For a moment, let's just realize the mad crazy language that we're working with and recall that JavaScript does this:

-2 ? true : false; // => true
0 ? true : false; // => false
-1 ? true : false; // => true 😲

Ah! Isn't that funny? -1 has a truthiness of true and the only integer that has a truthiness of false is 0. So really, we can use tilde as a shorthand. Check this out:

// Instead of doing this
if(!fruits.indexOf('apples') != -1) {
  // Mmm, I love apples.
}

 else {
  // We ain't got no apples
}

// We can do this 
// to see if an array contains a particular value 
// (btw, there's a better way to do this with ES6 now.

if (!!~fruits.indexOf('apples')) {
  // Yay apples
  console.log("Found apples!") // <= this will print
}
 else {
  // Still no apples
  console.log("No apples apparently")
}

Now, the question then becomes... am I going to use this? Probably not, but it's cool to know that it exists after having stumbled upon it. I don't think I'd use this much solely because I'd prefer others to understand my code as fast as possible if they have to read it.

I hope you learned something here and won't get alienated next time you see a ~ floating around.

[Update: 2018/02/05] I lied. It's been a single day and I've already used ~ at least 4 times in my personal projects. Hey man, I'm sorry- it's kinda cool!