String.prototype.isWellFormed()

The isWellFormed() method of String values returns a boolean indicating whether this string contains any lone surrogates.

Syntax

isWellFormed()

Return value

Returns true if this string does not contain any lone surrogates, false otherwise.

Strings in JavaScript are UTF-16 encoded. UTF-16 encoding has the concept of surrogate pairs, which is introduced in detail in the UTF-16 characters, Unicode code points, and grapheme clusters section.

isWellFormed() allows you to test whether a string is well-formed (i.e. does not contain any lone surrogates). Compared to a custom implementation, isWellFormed() is more efficient, as engines can directly access the internal representation of strings. If you need to convert a string to a well-formed string, use the toWellFormed() method. isWellFormed() allows you to handle ill-formed strings differently from well-formed strings, such as throwing an error or marking it as invalid.

Examples

Using isWellFormed()

const strings = [
  // Lone leading surrogate
  "ab\uD800",
  "ab\uD800c",
  // Lone trailing surrogate
  "\uDFFFab",
  "c\uDFFFab",
  // Well-formed
  "abc",
  "ab\uD83D\uDE04c",
];

for (const str of strings) {
  console.log(str.isWellFormed());
}
// Logs:
// false
// false
// false
// false
// true
// true

Avoiding errors in encodeURI()

encodeURI throws an error if the string passed is not well-formed. This can be avoided by using isWellFormed() to test the string before passing it to encodeURI().

const illFormed = "https://example.com/search?q=\uD800";

try {
  encodeURI(illFormed);
} catch (e) {
  console.log(e); // URIError: URI malformed
}

if (illFormed.isWellFormed()) {
  console.log(encodeURI(illFormed));
} else {
  console.warn("Ill-formed strings encountered."); // Ill-formed strings encountered.
}

Specifications

Specification
ECMAScript Language Specification # sec-string.prototype.iswellformed

Browser compatibility

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