Tip 4: Variables to Readable Strings with Template Literals

Combining strings

Strings are messy. That’s all there is to it. When you’re pulling information from strings, you have to deal with the ugliness of natural language: capitalization, punctuation, misspellings. It’s a headache.

Collecting information into strings is less painful, but it can still get ugly quickly. Combining strings in JavaScript can be particularly rough, especially when you combine strings assigned to variables with strings surrounded by quotes.

Example

Here’s a situation that comes up all the time: You need to build a URL. In this case, you’re building a link to an image on a cloud service. Your cloud service is pretty great, though. In addition to hosting the asset, you can pass query parameters that will convert the asset in a variety of ways (height, width, and so on).

To keep things relatively ...