JavaScript – Testing For Negative Zero

One thing that I always took for granted until last week was testing for negative numbers. What I mean is that I had no clue that -0 is actually different from 0. Interestingly enough when using strict equality to test the two values they still appear to be equal but they are in fact different. For this reason, I decided to write the following function:

function isNegative(n) {
  return ((n = +n) || 1 / n) < 0;
}
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I admit that this function probably isn't that useful because I haven't thought of one time when you really need to know if a value is <code>-0</code> or <code>0</code>, but just in case I or anyone else in the future does need a way to differentiate, the above function should do the trick.  The following are some examples of calling the function:

var a = isNegative(-Infinity); // true
var b = isNegative(-12);       // true
var c = isNegative(-0);        // true
var d = isNegative(0);         // false
var e = isNegative(34);        // false
var f = isNegative(Infinity);  // false
var g = isNegative("Hello");   // NaN -> false
var h = isNegative(undefined); // NaN -> false
var i = isNegative(null);      // 0 -> false
var j = isNegative(-null);     // -0 -> true
var k = isNegative("-5");      // -5 -> true
var l = isNegative("-0");      // -0 -> true
var m = isNegative("0");      // 0 -> false
var n = isNegative("6");      // 6 -> false
var o = isNegative("");      // 0 -> false

I'm guessing this is more than you ever wanted to know about negative numbers so I will end the post here. 😎