Switch Statements error

Hi,

my switch statement seems to have an error and I just can’t seem to work it out.
Every time I run a test, the error I’m faced with is;

// running tests

switchOfStuff(“a”)
should have a value of “apple”
switchOfStuff(“b”)
should have a value of “bird”
switchOfStuff(“c”)
should have a value of “cat”
switchOfStuff(“d”)
should have a value of “stuff”
switchOfStuff(4)
should have a value of “stuff” You should use a default
statement //
tests completed
// console output
ReferenceError: a is not defined

So if I input a,b,c, into the console.log(swithOfStuff(a)) this error appears however as soon as I put “a”, “b”, “c” this seems to work perfectly and when I run the test I’m told I’ve passed.

My code so far


function switchOfStuff(val) {
var answer = "";
// Only change code below this line
switch (val) {
case "a":
answer = "apple";
break;
case "b":
answer = "bird";
break;
case "c":
answer = "cat";
break;
default:
answer = "stuff";
break;
}


// Only change code above this line
return answer;
}

// Change this value to test
console.log(switchOfStuff(a));

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User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.106 Safari/537.36.

Challenge: Adding a Default Option in Switch Statements

Link to the challenge:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/basic-javascript/adding-a-default-option-in-switch-statements

"a" is a string (the letter a).
a is a variable. If you haven’t defined a variable called a and then you try to use it , you will get an error.

So in this case should I just remove the quotation marks?

Are you supposed to match the letter “a” or is there a variable named a that you are trying to match?

1 Like

in case you have not noticed, this is the line talked about