How to check 'undefined' value in jQuery

JQuery library was developed specifically to simplify and to unify certain JavaScript functionality.

However if you need to check a variable against undefined value, there is no need to invent any special method, since JavaScript has a typeof operator, which is simple, fast and cross-platform:

if (typeof value === "undefined") {
    // ...
}

It returns a string indicating the type of the variable or other unevaluated operand. The main advantage of this method, compared to if (value === undefined) { ... }, is that typeof will never raise an exception in case if variable value does not exist.

In this case you can use a === undefined comparison: if(val === undefined)

This works because val always exists (it's a function argument).

If you wanted to test an arbitrary variable that is not an argument, i.e. might not be defined at all, you'd have to use if(typeof val === 'undefined') to avoid an exception in case val didn't exist.