Typescript type assertion

During application development, it may happen that you deal with a situation where you will know more about the value than TypeScript does. Most often in a situation, where you know that the type of a certain entity could be more specific than it is now.

Type assertion is a way to explicitly inform the compiler that you want to treat the entity as it would have a different type. This allows you to treat any as a number, or a number as a string. Let's have a look at the following example:

let someValue: any = "I am sure I am a string";

Although, we are sure that someValue contains a string, for the compiler it still has a type of any. As result, you won't be able to use methods like length() which is a default method for a string type variable. What you can do is to inform the compiler to treat it as a string. You can do this in two ways:

let strLength: number = (someValue).length;

Or using the as syntax:

let strLength: number = (someValue as string).length;