sindresorhus / type-fest

A collection of essential TypeScript types
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Non-Empty String Type #946

Open roryabraham opened 3 months ago

roryabraham commented 3 months ago

It seems pretty common that we run into issues with a string being empty when it's not supposed to. These are some common issues I see:

  1. An API parameter is meant to be a string, but an empty string isn't valid.
  2. We mean to default an empty string to something else, such as '-1', but our ESLint config encourages us to use nullish coalescing ?? instead of ||. Obviously these don't work the same in cases where you have an empty string.

anyways, my suggestion is to create a type called NonEmptyString. According to this Stackoverflow, the best way to accomplish this is with a very verbose template literal with any non-empty character followed by a string

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sindresorhus commented 3 months ago

Could be useful, but someone has to prove that it works in practice without too many downsides.

Some alternatives:

type NonEmptyString = string & {0: string}
type NonEmptyString = string & {length: Exclude<number, 0>};
type NonEmptyString = string extends '' ? never : string;