Handling big integers in JavaScript

As a part of my training and to refresh myself on certain topics, I recently returned to solving katas from codewars. After few easy ones I jumped to 4 kyu kata with the following instruction:

Multiply two numbers! Simple!

- The arguments are passed as strings.
- The numbers may be way very large
- Answer should be returned as a string
- The returned "number" should not start with zeros e.g. 0123 is invalid

Sounds pretty easy, right? My first attempt looked like this:

function multiply(a, b) {
    const paramA = parseFloat(a.toLocaleString());
    const paramB = parseFloat(b.toLocaleString());
    return (paramA * paramB).toString()
}

Unfortunately, the result was given with an exponential. So besides the decimal number I got ‘2.8308690771532805e+48’. That was not the solution I was (and the kata tests ;-)) looking for.

Here I found that BigInt might be helpful in this case. It’s a primitive wrapper object introduced in ES2020. Keep in mind that it’s quite a new feature, and it won’t be available in newer browser versions.

That’s the solution for this task:

function multiply(a, b) {
    return (BigInt(a) * BigInt(b)).toString();
}

That’s it. Thanks to BigInt wrapper it’s possible to represent every number which cannot be handler by the number primitive.

Here’s an example of how it works in the wild.

const regularBigNumber = 98172784239189284787326419872394817239487126349871263948716234;
const bigNumberWrapped = BigInt(regularBigNumber);

console.log(regularBigNumber) // Output: 9.817278423918929e+61
console.log(bigNumberWrapper) // Output: 98172784239189284787326419872394817239487126349871263948716234

It handles different formats of numbers, like hex, octal or binary. We can pass a number as a string - it will be converted as well.

That was the first time I needed to use BigInt and probably I won’t have many chances to use it in the future ;-). In my opinion, however, it’s important to know even less known features or obscure functionalities of the programming language in which we work every day.

For more details I suggest to read the MDN documentation