Meaning of if something length in jQuery

Question

I was parsing some smooth-scrolling code online (at https://css-tricks.com/snippets/jquery/smooth-scrolling/) and found the line if (target.length) {some stuff}. Doesn't the .length operator return an integer? How does this work with the if() statement, as I thought they take only true/false values? The same target.length was used as the condition for a ternary statement slightly earlier in the code.

Answer 1

The if statement in JavaScript returns true for any number greater (or less) than zero, and false for 0 (there are many more rules beyond this which I will not mention for this question). Hence in your code snippet

if (target.length) {some stuff}

The some stuff would be evaluated if the target had a non zero length. If the target had a zero length, possibly indicating that it were empty, the some stuff content would not evaluate.