One of my colleagues just discovered this bug/feature in AngularJS. Using an ngIf on a string "no" will result in false.

HTML:

<div ng-app>
    <div ng-controller="yesNoController">
        <div ng-if="yes">Yes is defined, will display</div>
        <div ng-if="no">No is defined, but will not display on Angular 1.2.1</div>
        <div ng-if="notDefined">Not defined, will not display</div>
    </div>
</div>

JavaScript:

function yesNoController($scope) {
    $scope.yes = "yes";
    $scope.no = "no";
    $scope.notDefined = undefined;
}

Will print:

Yes is defined, will display

Let’s read the documentation on expression, to see where this case is covered.

.

.

.

.

Can you find it?

Neither can I.

Fix?

Use the double bang:

// ...
<div ng-if="!!no">No is defined, but we need to add a double bang for it to parse correctly</div>
// ...

JSFiddle can be found here.

For those who care, it’s not a JS thing:

// execute this line in a console
alert("no" ? "no evaluated as true" : "no evaluated as false"); // will alert "no evaluated as true"