Handling undefined in Typescript

Today I learned a neat way of handling undefined in Typescript.

Suppose you have retrieved some data from an API which has optional fields. The Typescript model may look like this:

interface Person {
    firstName: string
    middleName?: string
    surname: string
}

The type of middleName will be string | undefined.

If we want a function that uppercases the fields we could write it like this.

const uppercase = (field: string | undefined) => {
   return field ? field.toUpperCase() : "";
};

A nicer alternative is this:

const uppercase = (field = "") => {
   return field.toUpperCase();
};

If field is undefined, the default value will be assigned to the argument, removing the need for the check.