Strange behavior when comparing numbers

Question

So I'm writing a function to test substrings, and apparently it's telling me that 1 through 3 is greater than 13, this is the code that I'm using:

var highlight = function(first,last,whichsub){
  var text = $(".output2").text();
  if(whichsub === "substring"){
    text = text.substring(0,first)+"<color style='background:#0763D3'>"+text.substring(first,last)+"</color>"+text.substring(last);
  }else if(whichsub === "substr"){
    text = text.substr(0,first)+"<color style='background:#0763D3'>"+text.substr(first,last)+"</color>"+text.substr(last);
  }
  //console.log(text);
  console.log(first+" "+last);
  if(first > last){console.log("true");} // is printing true
  $(".output2").html(text);
};

I'm not inexperienced with javascript in any way, but I still can't understand what could be causing this.

Does anyone have any idea where I went wrong? Thanks!

Answer 1

Ah, I figured out the problem just as I finished writing the question, but figured I'd also post it here with the correct answer/why it was happening...

The console.log was misleading. It was telling me 3 > 13 , which is clearly wrong, but happens to evaluate to true assuming we are talking about "3" and "13" as a STRING rather than an integer. That's where I went wrong, comparing wrong data types.

I was plugging in a value from an input[type=number].val() which I just assumed returned a number, but was wrong. Number inputs return a string when used with .val() .

var parsedF = parseInt(first) & var parsedL = parseInt(last) work as intended.

Hopefully this helps someone!