Input / Output

Input and output in JavaScript

Command line output

console.log() provides command line output shown in the Terminal and in the console of a browser's dev tools.

Command line input

Accepting user input requires a Node.js API called readline. For our purposes, we use a library called readlineSync available through NPM.

How to install readline-sync:

$ npm install readline-sync --save
npm notice created a lockfile as package-lock.

How to use readlineSync:

• Use the require function to import the readline-sync library.
• Assign that function to a variable for later use.
• Use that variable with the readline-sync methods: question(), prompt(), etc..

let rlSync = require('readline-sync');
let name = rlSync.question("What's your name?\n");
console.log(`Good Morning, ${name}!`);

Note that question() returns string data, so when working with numbers, these must be coerced to the Number data type.

Browser input (basic)

Include a JS script in the HTML. In the script, use the prompt function for a user input popup box. Input can be stored as a variable and used elsewhere in the script.

let name = prompt("What's your name?");
console.log(`Good Morning, ${name}`);

This data can be sent to the console via console.log() or through the alert function in the browser.