Personally I would just ban the usage of String() altogether as there are much better and safer ways to coerce things to strings.

Bumping, because this rule has just become "error" in recommended set.

Personally I would just ban the usage of String() altogether as there are much better and safer ways to coerce things to strings.

@bradzacher I'm really curious: what do you recommend as an alternative? MDN (which is... written by me) recommends using String(), because it's the only operation that doesn't fail on symbols, which seems more fool-proof than `${value}`.

@Josh-Cena it depends on the intent of the code as to exactly what you want to use.

For stringification you can break it down into three usecases:

• user visible strings
• system visible strings (eg keys)
• dev visible strings

User visible strings shouldn't ever use String(), period. You should never ever be stringifying an unknown value for the user - some formatting / pretification should occur.

System visible strings are less strict - but it's similarly doubtful you're going to be stringifying an unknown value for your system. If you are generally you want a comprehensive and consistent form like JSON.stringify instead of String() though so it encodes objects/arrays properly.

Dev visible strings are just logs and really "anything goes". It's not common to stringify an unknown value for this case. Again however JSON.stringify is generally better - but if you do truly want to handle every single unknown value - even undefined and Symbol - then a hybrid approach with type guards to leverage String() carefully is better still.

With all that said - realistically the usecases for actually wanting String() are rare because there are better alternatives. But I agree - sometimes you do want it.
If we think there are some legitimate cases - we might encode them in the rule!

@KIMBUM

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