Why does console.log(true, '\t') print true " "?

Question

In Chrome, the following

console.log(true, '\t');

will print

true "  "

Why are there quotes hanging around?

(Notice that console.log(true + '', '\t') will only print true, in the same way that console.log('a', '\t'); will only print a.)

Answer 1

Basically there are two overloads to console.log:

console.log(formatString, args) and console.log(arg1, arg2, ...).

More specifically, per the source code, if the first parameter is a string then it treats it as a format string for the other parameters. Otherwise, each parameter is output directly.

Thus console.log(true + '', '\t') outputs 'true' because the first parameter is a string and there is no placeholder for the \t, and console.log(true, '\t') will output both parameters because true is not a string.

Answer 2

I decided to play around with it

console.log(true, '\t');
true "  "

and then I tried the opposite

console.log(false, '\t');
false " " 

Not sure why but false gives back only one space, while true gives back two o_O... Also if \t is in the beginning there is no issue

console.log('\t', true);
     true

It also doesn't matter what happens after it but it seems that the first parameter if its a boolean in general, will influence all the escaped tabs after with quotes.

console.log(false, '\t', '\t');
false " " " "

So it definitely has something to do with the first paramater being a boolean because if you try it with strings, it behaves completely normally. I guess its a quirky thing with Google Chrome? I'll need to find the source code to actually see it.