Improved typeof detection for node, Deno, and the browser.

Supported Browsers
Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Safari	IE
✅	✅	✅	✅	9, 10, 11

What is Type-Detect?

Type Detect is a module which you can use to detect the type of a given object. It returns a string representation of the object's type, either using typeof or @@toStringTag. It also normalizes some object names for consistency among browsers.

Why?

The typeof operator will only specify primitive values; everything else is "object" (including null, arrays, regexps, etc). Many developers use Object.prototype.toString() - which is a fine alternative and returns many more types (null returns [object Null], Arrays as [object Array], regexps as [object RegExp] etc).

Sadly, Object.prototype.toString is slow, and buggy. By slow - we mean it is slower than typeof. By buggy - we mean that some values (like Promises, the global object, iterators, dataviews, a bunch of HTML elements) all report different things in different browsers.

type-detect fixes all of the shortcomings with Object.prototype.toString. We have extra code to speed up checks of JS and DOM objects, as much as 20-30x faster for some values. type-detect also fixes any consistencies with these objects.

Installation

Node.js

type-detect is available on npm. To install it, type:

$ npm install type-detect

Deno

type-detect can be imported with the following line:

import type from 'https://deno.land/x/type_detect@v4.1.0/index.ts'

Browsers

You can also use it within the browser; install via npm and use the type-detect.js file found within the download. For example:

<script src="./node_modules/type-detect/type-detect.js"></script>

Usage

The primary export of type-detect is function that can serve as a replacement for typeof. The results of this function will be more specific than that of native typeof.

var type = require('type-detect');

Or, in the browser use case, after the