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JavaScript closures are an essential concept that every developer should understand. They may seem daunting at first, but once you grasp their power, you’ll wonder how you ever wrote code without them.
In this article, we’ll explore closures in depth, providing clear explanations and practical examples to help you become a master of this game-changing technique.
What are Closures?
A closure is a function that has access to variables in an outer (enclosing) function’s scope, even after the outer function has finished executing. This concept might sound confusing, but let’s break it down with an example:
function outerFunction() {
const outerVar = 'I am outside!';
function innerFunction() {
console.log(outerVar); // 'I am outside!'
}
return innerFunction;
}
const myInnerFunction = outerFunction();
myInnerFunction(); // 'I am outside!'
In this code snippet, the innerFunction
has access to the outerVar
variable, even after outerFunction
has finished executing. This is because innerFunction
forms a closure with the variables in the scope of outerFunction
. The closure "closes over" those…