Checking parts of JavaScript code

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:
I am currently working on the Smallest Common Multiple challenge. What I want to know how to do at this stage is to check the code I have written so far? If I run the test on @freeCodeCamp it just says the output should be this etc…I haven’t fully written the whole code yet. I want to check the first part of the code to see if that is doing what I want it to do first. How do I do that? I have looked online and most things seem to suggest I have to write a unit test to do that. That seems a bit too much for a beginner. Please note that yes I am a beginner and most of the terminology is still new to me. I am getting frustrated that a lot of the websites phrase things in a way that makes it difficult for a beginner to wrap their head around.
All I want to know at this stage is there an easy way to check whether small bits of my code are working?
Thanks

Your code so far


function smallestCommons(arr) {
var max = Math.max(arr[0], arr[1]);
var min = Math.min(arr[0], arr[1]);
var range = [];
for (let i = min; i<=max; i++){
  range.push(i)
}


}


smallestCommons([1,5]);

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.113 Safari/537.36.

Challenge: Smallest Common Multiple

Link to the challenge:

2

What you can do is use the console.log(), don’t press the run test though, just type console.log(function()) and wait till the console pops the log itslef. It’ll log it here:

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3

Whereabouts do I write that console.log?

4

You can write that at the bottom of your code. It’ll look like this:

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5

in the editor.
whatever you put in a console.log statement will appear in the console

so you can use it to check values of variables, if something is executing etc.

6

Thank you so much that is really clear and easily explained. Thank you for doing that. :slight_smile:

7

No problem. @ILM also explain something that I really didn’t. You can console.log it anywhere in the code if you want to check specific part of your code. Just to clarify it.
Happy coding!!:slightly_smiling_face:

8

you can also use a tool like this: http://pythontutor.com/javascript.html#mode=edit
this will show the values of the variables at each step
but learning to use console.log is a must